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04e3818
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It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats.
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sleep
giants
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Neil Gaiman |
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d7125a5
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Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it.
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organizing
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Neil Gaiman |
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c34d49c
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When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It's scientific. That's how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.
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Neil Gaiman |
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9c3455b
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Remember your name. Do not lose hope --- what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.
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Neil Gaiman |
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e199b5a
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What do I do now?" "I don't know. Fade away, perhaps. Or find another role."
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Neil Gaiman |
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65940e0
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Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.
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Terry Pratchett Neil Gaiman |
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9915737
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I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.
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ideas
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Neil Gaiman |
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9372660
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You grow up readings about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and just when you think the world's all full of amazing things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hanging about millions of years.
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Neil Gaiman |
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9566ce3
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Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.
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stories
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Neil Gaiman |
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8eb2288
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What about volcanoes?" "What about them?" "All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true."
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humor
the-them
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Neil Gaiman |
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7894922
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You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you.
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Neil Gaiman |
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e774abf
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If a Devil is one who dares, when others hold back, then I am happy to play the Devil in this Mystery, boy.
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Neil Gaiman |
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029c5d9
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Coraline sighed. 'You really don't understand do you?' she said. 'I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted, just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?
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neil gaiman |
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32d50b7
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What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want?" "What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?" "Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth."
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Neil Gaiman |
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926da83
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Your turn in the chair next time," said October. "I know," said November. He was pale and thin-lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. "I like your stories. Mine are always too dark." "I don't think so," said October. "It's just that your nights are longer. And you aren't as warm." "Put it like that," said November, "and I feel better. I suppose we can't help who we are."
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Neil Gaiman |
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e599064
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I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it's worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.
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Neil Gaiman |
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1c93389
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How you want your coffee?" she asked her guests. "Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin." --
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Neil Gaiman |
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b9a2298
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I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.
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nightmares
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Neil Gaiman |
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8f5a3b2
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I'm just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge. Oh yes, I can hear you. But I'm not coming out.
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Neil Gaiman |
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5c8c691
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DESTRUCTION: Our sister [Death] defines life, just as Despair defines hope, or Desire defines hatred, or as Destiny defines freedom. MORPHEUS: And what do I define, by this theory of yours. DESTRUCTION: Reality, perhaps.
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Neil Gaiman |
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c8b4709
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I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.' ... We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I..
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growing-up
children
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Neil Gaiman |
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fd5c933
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Any way, death is so final, isn't it? "Is it?" asked Richard. "Sometimes," said the marquis de Carabas. And they went down."
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Neil Gaiman |
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f8c0a8e
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Here you go, she said. I don't need it anymore. I'm very grateful. I think it may have saved my life, saved some other people's death.
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Neil Gaiman |
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e9ba0a3
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I loved all books that I could read, and I never knew if I was ready for one until I tried to read it, so I tried to read everything.
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Neil Gaiman |
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f3b64b3
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The fallen autumn leaves were slick beneath Bod's feet, and the mists blurred the edges of the world. Nothing was as clean-cut as he had thought it, a few minutes before.
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Neil Gaiman |
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076c6c7
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When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget.
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Neil Gaiman |
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e256cc2
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The second thing I thought was that I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock's ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was - where the universe began, to the sound of the uncreated voices singing in the void-and I knew where the Rose was -the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last ..
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Neil Gaiman |
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c088a1e
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Some things are too big to be seen; some emotions too huge to be felt.
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life
sandman
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Neil Gaiman |
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5cf2531
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We all--adults and children, writers and readers--have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things..
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Neil Gaiman |
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0d46846
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It is as natural to die as it is to be born.
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Neil Gaiman |
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996e46a
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Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea.
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nurses
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Terry Pratchett Neil Gaiman |
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7c312c5
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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"
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women
song
nice
wine
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Neil Gaiman |
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b18a399
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It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.
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death-and-dying
death
truth
self-censorship
significance
perspective
etiquette
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Neil Gaiman |
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0b9e7f8
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Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.
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stars
worlds
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Neil Gaiman |
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0659a9a
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You," she told him, "are so full of shit, it's a wonder your eyes don't turn brown."
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Neil Gaiman |
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47273ec
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I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with.
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Neil Gaiman |
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fd05e25
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I do not know what you were like as a wood-nymph, madam, but you are a magnificent tree.
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Neil Gaiman |
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86c78b6
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Another piece of advice: I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work. So you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool. There are other people around who can do the mediocre meat and potatoes work that anybody can do. So let them do that. You make the art that only you can make. You tell the stories only you can tell.
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Neil Gaiman |
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f912c19
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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 w..
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Neil Gaiman |
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2f28c69
|
Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans."
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Neil Gaiman |
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fc4af5c
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Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.
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literature
readers
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Neil Gaiman |
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140298a
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Silence held the bubble of the world in its grip.
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Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchet |
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c4d366f
|
You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.
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hell
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Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett |
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2d2e17a
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It is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
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Neil Gaiman |