Great Throughts Treasury

"As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn't there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all."

"As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream."

"As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them."

"As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones."

"As I wouldn't wear a costume, I couldn't imagine him wanting to wear one. And seeing that the greater part of my wardrobe is black (It's a sensible color. It goes with anything. Well, anything black)[...]."

"At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow."

"B is for boat, pushing off into the dark. C is the way that we find and we look. D is for diamonds, the bait on the hook."

"Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you'd answer for your evil deeds and your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we'd feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls He must have eaten a lot of people. Not as many as you'd think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had better be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby..."

"As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time."

"As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end."

"At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune teller. Now, said Wednesday, at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. He dropped a coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot. Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up and put it in his pocket. Aren?t you going to show it to me? I?ll show you mine, said Shadow. A man?s fortune is his own affair, said Wednesday, stiffly. I would not ask to see yours. Shadow put his own coin into the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it. EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE. YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD. Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it inside his pocket."

"Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between."

"Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost."

"Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here."

"Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort."

"Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."

"Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember."

"Began to tear at it - not as a creature that eats earth and grass, but as if it were eating a curtain or a piece of scenery with the world painted on it."

"Been there, Remiel. Done that. Wore the T-Shirt, ate the burger, bought the original cast album, choreographed the legions of the damned and orchestrated the screaming."

"Biggest case we've had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone that got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. My Juvenile Delinquent Is Screwing Your Honor Student."

"Birds are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they're vicious."

"Black as night, sweet as sin."

"Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen."

"Bod quite liked crows. He thought they were funny and he liked the way they helped to keep the graveyard tidy."

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."

"Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared."

"Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly."

"Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was."

"Benjamin Lassiter was coming to the unavoidable conclusion that the woman who had written A Walking Tour of the British Coastline, the book he was carrying in his backpack, had never been on a walking tour of any kind, and would probably not recognize the British coastline if it were to dance through her bedroom at the head of a marching band, singing I?m the British Coastline in a loud and cheerful voice while accompanying itself on the kazoo."

"Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered."

"Bod said, "I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused, and thought. "I want everything.""

"Bodies are strange. Some people have real problems with the stuff that goes on inside them. You find out that inside someone you know there's just mucus and meat and slime and bone. They menstruate, salivate, defecate and cry. You know? Sometimes it can just kill the romance. You know that?"

"Bod tried to smile, but he could not find a smile inside himself."

"Books are real places, make no mistake about that."

"Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way Scarlett had held him and how safe he felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world."

"Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here."

"Books were safer than other people anyway."

"Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."

"But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?"

"But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted."

"But she knew also that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristan by arguing with his mother."

"But it was a dream, and in dreams, sometimes, you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began."

"But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them."

"But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me."

"But I thank Providence that I came here."

"But that's how it goes; you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you."

"But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept."

"But then it occurred to him that any progress he had made on his quest so far he had made by accepting the help that had been offered to him."

"Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead"