“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.”

“Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they're scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too. ”

“The only water in the forest is the River.”

“You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman.”

“Don't start anything you're not prepared to finish.”

“She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.”

“I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.”

“It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?”

“I'm going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.”

“You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly. 'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.”

“Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.”

“And there was a voice, a high clear, female voice, which said "Ow", and then, very quietly, it said "Fuck", and then it said "Ow", once more.”

“I really don't know what "I love you" means. I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.”

“Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.”

“I'll find you. Don't worry. Just be on your own and I'll find you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.”

“Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.”

“Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.”

“The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”