Great Throughts Treasury

"There was toast, too, cooked beneath the grill as my father cooked it, with homemade blackberry jam. There was the best cup of tea I ever drunk. By the fireplace, the kitten lapped at a saucer of creamy milk, and purred so loudly I could hear it across the room. I wished I could purr too, I would have purred then."

"There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination."

"There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs."

"There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world"

"There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas."

"There, she said, waving her hands at the corridor. The expression of delight on her face was a very bad thing to see.You're wrong! You don't know where your parents are, do you? she turned and looked at Coraline. Now, she said, you're going to stay here forever and always."

"There,' said Wednesday, 'is one who does not have the faith and will not have the fun. Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers-by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let's see - I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favour here - this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets."

"There's a but, isn't there? said Coraline. I can feel it. Like a rain cloud."

"There's atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that's what we're all made of. And there's things that are smaller than atoms, and that's Particle Physics. Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett's father was probably interested in imaginary things."

"There's an expression, deja vu, that means that you feel like you've been somewhere before, that you've somehow already dreamed it or experienced it in your mind."

"There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories."

"They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive."

"These are just a few samples, for more quotations from this work see American Gods"

"They become more personable as you head south, the people. You sit in a diner and, along with your coffee and your food, they bring you comments, questions, smiles, and nods."

"They might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn?t speak in clich‚s"

"They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him... to him we no longer speak."

"They could not truly look dead, because they did not ever look alive."

"They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran's heart pounded in his chest as if it was not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her."

"They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness."

"They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance."

"They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing."

"They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with."

"They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along."

"They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books"

"Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time."

"Things. They came up. That what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all"

"This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence."

"This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones I Wanna Be Sedated is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it."

"This is a bright place, filled with frightened people, and fast hard things that hurt and wound. No matter. I swore I would remain by her side forever, and until death divided us."

"This is crazy', said Shadow. Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break."

"This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof."

"This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things."

"This is not a place, after all. It is BETWEEN places. This is NOWHERE. A brief thought: I could stay here, abandon my quest, hang forever in the void, safe and cold and alone."

"This is my body, he said, two thousand years ago. This is my blood. It was the only religion that delivered exactly what it promised: life eternal for its adherents. There are some of us alive today who remember him. And some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world."

"This is the only country in the world, said Wednesday, into the stillness, that worries about what it is. What? The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are."

"This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality."

"There were three of them there, then, and Amabella was introducing Bod and he was shaking hands and saying, Charmed, I'm sure, because he could greet people politely over nine hundred years of changing manners."

"This little piggy went to Hades. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh. This little piggy violated virgins. And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top"

"This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he's carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face for haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair."

"Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries. It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind."

"Time is fluid here', said the Demon."

"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due."

"To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don't think anyone ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny; horny and scared, so when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and they call it love."

"To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel"

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"

"This book started like this. My son, who is called Michael or Mike these days, but was Mikey back then, was angry at me. I'd said one of those things that parents say, like ®isn't it time you were in bed¯, and he had looked up at me, furious, and said, ®I wish I didn't have a dad! I wish I had...¯ and then stopped and thought, trying to think of what one could have instead of a father. Finally he said ®I wish I had goldfish!"

"They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?"

"There's this thing, they have in French: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out."