“I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

“We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.”

“Some things are too big to be seen; some emotions are too huge to be felt.”

“Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.”

“Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope.”

“It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.”

“People tend to find books when they are ready for them.”

“Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.”

“And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.”

“Goodbyes are overrated.”

“Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”

“Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.”

“The Norse myths are the myths of a chilly place, with long, long winter nights and endless summer days, myths of a people who did not entirely trust or even like their gods, although they respected and feared them.”

“I am hope.”

“Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.”

“I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.”

“I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.”

“You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

“You were her way here, and it's a dangerous thing to be a door.”

“It won't hurt, said her other father. Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn't hurt it almost always did. She shook her head.”

“There was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.”

“People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.”

“Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.”