People can get involved in wonderfully creative ways that have nothing to do with you, but spark off things you begin with. Neil Gaiman More Quotes by Neil Gaiman More Quotes From Neil Gaiman How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. Neil Gaiman land heart world It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us. Neil Gaiman details matter remember But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Neil Gaiman coming-back waiting memories 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 t here 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. Neil Gaiman views long thinking Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here. Neil Gaiman knowing-everything stuff giving Idris: Are all people like this? The Doctor: Like what? Idris: So much bigger on the inside. Neil Gaiman doctors bigger people I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything. Neil Gaiman remembered remember She didn't have a daddy?" I asked. "No." "Did you have a daddy?" "You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men. Neil Gaiman daddy men father I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was. Neil Gaiman selfish rocks children There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out. Neil Gaiman clever mean thinking It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds. Neil Gaiman sand desert world She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did. Neil Gaiman mind heart father She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how. Neil Gaiman coraline forgotten long Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. Neil Gaiman different two people They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with. Neil Gaiman my-friends people school I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations. Neil Gaiman long book children Hasn't there always been a moon?" "Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky - it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue. Neil Gaiman moon sky dirty You can't just boss bacteria around like that," said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. "They don't like it." "Stuff and silliness," said the old lady. "You leave wigglers alone and they'll be carrying on like anything. Show them who's boss and they can't do enough for you. You've tasted my cheese. Neil Gaiman carrying-on boss stuff Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things. Neil Gaiman believe children world My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the windows open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open my windows and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown onto my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat. Neil Gaiman wall ocean sleep