Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
27 quotes
"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each."
"Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war." It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far."
"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song"..."Curry’s nice too" pointed out Fat Charlie"
"Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island."
"You know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.’And this means…?’Well’, she said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?"
"I think all - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around."
"Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time."
"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."
"He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.**Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night."
"It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck."
"Black as night, sweet as sin."
"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."
"People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song."
"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all."
"People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before."
"That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know."
"Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie's mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of "Back! Foul best of Hell!" followed by gasps of "Is it alive?" and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers."
"Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Coffee? Water?" Don't say wax fruit. "Wax fruit?" Damn."
"Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds."
"Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information."
"Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to."
"The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties."
"Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it."
"I'm a mother," said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know."
"Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."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."