Treyg2011 > Treyg2011's Quotes

“All men burn with foolish jealousy, but women are fools to take delight in it. This world is full of fools no matter where you look.”
― Isuna Hasekura, Spice & Wolf, Vol. 01

“The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you”
― Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men

“While one may lose much because of avarice, nothing was ever accomplished by abstinence.”
― Isuna Hasekura, Spice & Wolf, Vol. 01

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made.”
― George Burns

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We...we could be friends.'

We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman

“As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. ”
― Neil Gaiman

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Book of Dreams

“Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes... ”
― Neil Gaiman, The Absolute Sandman, Volume 1

“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. ”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Love is one of the most intense feelings felt by man; another is hate. Forcing yourself to feel indiscriminate love is very unnatural. If you try to love everyone you only lessen your feelings for those who deserve your love. Repressed hatred can lead to many physical and emotional aliments. By learning to release your hatred towards those who deserve it, you cleanse yourself of these malignant emotions and need not take your pent-up hatred out on your loved ones.”
― Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“In my story you're the villain. But in my heart, you're still the reigning King.”
― Coco J. Ginger

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.”
― Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere: Selected Poems