“There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.”

“I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.”

“I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.”

“I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it.”

“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.”

“It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.”

“You're brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don't care if you are imaginary.”

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

“We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.”

“We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves.”

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

“When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel.”

“Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.”

“You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.”

“I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you.”

“For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.”

“Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.”

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

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

“Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted.”

“Because,” said Thor, “when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki’s fault. It saves a lot of time.”

“Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.”

“It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.”

“This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things.”

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

“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.”

“His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.”

“It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.”

“It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.”

“A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.”

“Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.”

“I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.”

“Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.”

“It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.”

“I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.”

“The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.”

“It's always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

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

“If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.”

“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.”

“A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.”

“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.”

“So many things to see, people to do.”

“He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”

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

“He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring because yesterday has brought it.”

“Let's start a new tomorrow, today.”

“I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.”

“Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?”

“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.”