Great Throughts Treasury

"Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition."

"You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize. He paused. And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third."

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."

"I think if you decide that any book is about Only One Thing you're probably wrong. Even if that thing is in there."

"Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own."

"The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs. People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen."

"She will take you life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten."

"Fiction allows us to slide into these heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives."

"Lives are snowflakes - unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection.)"

"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people – but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer, in the numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless."

"That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realising that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you're rubbing against worm food. No offense meant."

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

"A flash of resentment. It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having... if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn't fair. Life's not fair, said Ginnie, as if I had spoken aloud."

"I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, when I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?"

"No, said the cat. 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."

"As Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him. When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the finger."

"After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place."

"Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns."

"She held a bluebell up to the light; and Dunstan could not but observe that the color of sunlight glittering through the purple crystal was inferior in both hue and shade to that of her eyes."

"A god's relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes."

"A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world."

"A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it."

"A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."

"A man who knows that time and the train wait for no man."

"A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up."

"A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain by Mr. Neil Gaiman, scrivener, and then doodled, elaborated upon, illustrated, and beaten soundly by Mr. Cris Grimly, etcher and illuminator, featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastiness, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged."

"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."

"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."

"A story that began with, and exists because of, my love of the remoter parts of Scotland, where the bones of the Earth show through, and the sky is a pale white, and it's all astoundingly beautiful, and it feels about as remote as any place can possibly be."

"A song can last long after the events and people in it are dust and dreams and gone."

"A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard's parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived this evening without a confirmed reservation, even they would be turned out into the street with a continental jeer."

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

"A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true."

"A voice from the creature, smooth as buttered oil. He-llo, is said. Ding-dong. You look remarkably like dinner. I'm Charlie Nancy, said Charlie Nancy. Who are you? I am Dragon, said the dragon. And I shall devour you in one slow mouthful, little man in a hat. Charlie blinked. What would my father do? He wondered. What would Spider have done?... Er. You?re bored with talking to me now, and you?re going to let me pass unhindered, he told the dragon, with as much conviction as he was able to muster. Gosh. Good try. But I?m afraid I?m not, said the dragon, enthusiastically. Actually, I?m going to eat you. You aren?t scared of limes, are you? asked Charlie, before remembering that he?d given the lime to Daisy. The creature laughed, scornfully. I, it said, am frightened of nothing. Nothing? Nothing, it said. Charlie said Are you extremely frightened of nothing? Absolutely terrified of it, admitted the Dragon. You know, said Charlie, Have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it? No, said the dragon, uncomfortably, I most definitely would not. There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. That, he said, was much too easy."

"A wise man once said: Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human? Pointless, really. Now, do the stars gaze back? That is a question."

"According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea."

"Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?"

"A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope."

"Adam didn?t read any comics at all. They never lived up to the kind of things he could do in his head."

"Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross."

"Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive."

"Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences."

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

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

"After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it's actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers."

"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories-if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

"All bookshelves are magical."

"Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold."

"Afterward he remembered only the feeling that he was about to leave somewhere small and rational - a place that made sense - for somewhere huge and old that didn't."

"All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new."