“You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.”

“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”

“And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

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

“And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”

“Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.”

“When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

“Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.”

“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”

“Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.”

“I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.”

“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.”

“Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.”

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”

“There's none so blind as those who will not listen.”

“What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?”

“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

“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 don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”

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

“Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.”

“Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.”

“I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

“People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”

“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.”

“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”

“Words save our lives, sometimes.”

“I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something.”

“Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”

“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”

“That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?”

“Libraries are our friends.”

“You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.”

“Black as night, sweet as sin.”

“You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.”

“It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

“You don't have to stay anywhere forever.”

“If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.”

“Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.”

“We owe it to each other to tell stories.”

It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.