Great Throughts Treasury

"You got a story to tell, and you are the only one who can tell it. Don't give up!"

"You grow up readings about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and just when you think the world's all full of amazing things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hanging about millions of years."

"You have a very open relationship with your fans. Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers."

"You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen."

"You hurt. It's okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand."

"You know how is it when you love someone? And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There's always a piece of them in your heart."

"You ignore the little voices that tell you it's all stupid, and you keep going."

"You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds and thinking maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like it."

"You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly. 'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline."

"You know that I love you."

"You know what happens when you dream of falling? Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."

"You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue."

"You know what my mum once said?? said Rosie? ?She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.?"

"You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It's that something's going on in your head, and you can't control it. I mean, It's like there's these bad worlds inside you. But it's just you...it's like you're betraying yourself"

"You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn't true. I know a lot about love. I've seen it, centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate... It made me want to turn away and never look down again. But when I see the way that mankind loves... You could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and... What I'm trying to say, Tristan is... I think I love you. Is this love, Tristan? I never imagined I'd know it for myself. My heart... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it's trying to escape because it doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I'd wish for nothing in exchange - no gifts. No goods. No demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine."

"You know you can set fire to the capacity to say."

"You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less."

"You must come to the Vicarage, then, next week, said the vicar."

"You made peace, said the buffalo man. You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here?and the people who worshiped them were here?because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will."

"You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer."

"You musn?t be afraid of the dark.? ?I?m not,? said Shadow. ?I?m afraid of the people in the dark."

"You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go."

"You 're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential."

"You play your cards so close to your chest, said Shadow, that I'm not even sure they're really cards at all."

"You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually."

"You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof of an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion."

"You have to finish things ? that?s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things."

"You see, while I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien?s words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight."

"You shine like a beacon in a dark world."

"You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter."

"You should know that if we do fucking kill you, the we'll just delete you. You got that? One click and then you're over-written with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option."

"You think you know all there is to know about here immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood."

"You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer and the finest friend."

"You wanna be the next Tolkien? Don't read big, Tolkien-esque fantasies. TOLKIEN didn't read big, Tolkien-esque fantasies. He read books on Finnish philology. You go and read outside your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. And then the most important thing, once you get any level of quality--get to the point where you wanna write, and you can write--is tell YOUR story. Don't tell a story anyone else can tell. Because you always start out with other people's voices... There will always be people who are better or smarter than you. There are people who are better writers than me, who plot better than I do, but there is no one who can tell a Neil Gaiman story like I can."

"You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken. Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time your persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again. Whenever it rains, you will think of her."

"You were her way here, and it's a dangerous thing to be a door."

"You were lucky,' said Lettie. 'Fifteen feet further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.' 'You would have come anyway,' I told her. 'You would have saved me."

"You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time. Thank you. Do you want something?"

"You wouldn't die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that's not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an 'I.' No point of view any longer, because you'd be an infinite sequence of views and of points..."

"You, she told him, are so full of shit, it's a wonder your eyes don't turn brown."

"You wouldn't have to wash, said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground in about Brian."

"You?re as plain as the nose on your face, said Mr. Pennyworth. And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody."

"You?re going back? asked Bod. Things that had been immutable were changing. You?re really leaving? But. You?re my guardian."

"You?ve a good heart, she told him. Sometimes that?s enough to see you safe wherever you go. Then she shook her head. But mostly, it?s not."

"You're a big one... a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don't look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him."

"You'll think this is a bit silly, but I'm a bit--well, I have a thing about birds. What, a phobia? Sort of. Well, that's the common term for an irrational fear of birds. What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?"

"Young man, he said, understand this: there are two Londons. There's London Above?that's where you lived?and then there's London Below?the Underside?inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you're one of them. Good night."

"You will learn more from a glorious failure than ever you will from something that you never finished."

"You?ve got to admit it?s a bit of a pantomime, though, said Crawly. I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying ?Don?t Touch? in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He?s really planning."

"You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous."