Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you’ll see the world
If I’m not mistaken…
Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure…
Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.
In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.
On the first day Coraline’s family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.
Of course, everyone’s parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.
Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.
The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.
Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.
I’m not blessed, or merciful. I’m just me. I’ve got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we’re talking, I’m there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I’m in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
I think, well, I’ve had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn’t fair. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time… But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night… ‘Strewth, well, you’ve got to respect the old bastard, haven’t you?
Normally, in anything I do, I’m fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.
For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.
I am the most miserable person who ever lived,” he said… “You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.
It doth not hurt, whispered a faint voice, She will take you life and all you are and all you care’st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She’ll take your joy. And one day you’ll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you’ll be, a wisp you’ll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.
There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.” “I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense.
You’re Hell’s Angels, then? What chapter are you from?”REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert’s dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
Bod shrugged. So? he said. It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.
And why does he talk so funny? Doesn’t he mean squashed tomatoes?I don’t think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that’s just how they talk then.
It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.
For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.
All Bette’s stories have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
Hey, said Shadow. Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are. The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.Say ‘Nevermore,’ said Shadow.Fuck you, said the raven.
Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?Then what died? who are you mourning?A point of view.
I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.
Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.
Kiss a lover,
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure.
Face your life,
It’s pain,
It’s pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.
Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from ‘Instructions’)
Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.The two are rarely compatible.
Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
DEATH: Mostly they aren’t too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear.MORPHEUS: And I am far more terrible than you, sister.
How do I know you’ll keep your word? asked Coraline.I swear it, said the other mother. I swear it on my own mother’s grave.Does she have a grave? asked Coraline.Oh yes, said the other mother. I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.
She’s realized the real problem with stories — if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
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.
Charitably… I think… sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.’27 And the Lord did not ask him again.
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.
The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.
There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.
Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they’ve got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?No, Matthew. What do they say?The king is dead, that’s what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.
When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.