N is for Neil Gaiman #AtoZChallenge

Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!

For letter N, I’ve chosen fantasy author Neil Gaiman. It’s unusual for me to watch a film before reading the book, but that’s what happened with both Stardust and Coraline. I was very late to the party in realising what a genius Neil Gaiman is. I read The Graveyard Book after reading a sample chapter to my students at work and falling in love with it, which led me to purchase his story anthology, M for Magic. Then I read Good Omens after discovering the TV show. I’ve now got lots of his books on my TBR list: American Gods, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Norse Mythology, plus Sandman on audible.

My Favourite Quotes by Neil Gaiman

“She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”

“Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to let it go.”

“The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.”

“It’s a strange place, The Imagination. A lot of fun by day, when there are all sorts of reassuring and familiar sights and people around. But it’s scary, and cold at night, and places you knew perfectly well by daylight aren’t the same after the sun’s gone down. You can get lost easily there, and some people never find their way back. You can hear a few of them, when the ghost moon shines, and the wind’s in the right direction. They scream for a while, and then they stop. And in the silence you hear something else: the sound of something large and quiet, tentatively beginning to feed… The imagination is a dangerous place, after all, and you can always use a guide to the territory.”

 Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”

“You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.”

“Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’ Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘… Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.”

“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 he thought. ‘I want everything.”

“You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies.”

“Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?”

“I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.’ ‘If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said.”

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“If you never saw the stars, ca“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

“Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”

“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?”

‘No,’ said the cat. ‘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.”

“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.”

“Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she met made any sense.”

Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”

“Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”

“You’re Hell’s Angels, then? What chapter are you from?’ ‘REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.”

“All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.”

“People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”

“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.”

“Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you’ve built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can’t be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.”

Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Have you read anything by Neil Gaiman? Do you have a favourite quote by an author or from a book beginning with N? Let me know in the comments!