Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
25 quotes
"Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."
"We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write."
"And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then."
"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."
"The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate."
"You aren't allowed out of the graveyard -it's aren't, by the way, not amn't, not these days-because it's only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet."
"You’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody."
"But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open."
"You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change."
"There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion."
"Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."
"Leave no path untaken."
"Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?"
"Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us."
"If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away."
"You are almost never cool to your children."
"Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas."
"If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” Liza tells Bod."
"...Come home, Bod.' ‘I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.’ ‘If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said."
"We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries."
"A grayeyard is not a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy.."
"Traveling through the Dragon's Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows:"So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us.""And a pig," said Kandar [the mummy]"Why?" Asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the Pig?""It's lucky," said Kandar.Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced."Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply."
"You're weird,' she said. 'You don't have any friends.''I didn't come here for friends,' said Bod truthfully. "i came here to learn.'Mo's nose twitched. "Do you know how weird that is?' she asked. "Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to."
"How old are you?""About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did," Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, "And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."
"Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between."