There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl...

Oh … My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.

How do I know you’ll keep your word?” asked Coraline.”I swear it,” said the other mother. “I swear it on my own mother’s grave.””Does she have a grave?” asked Coraline.”Oh yes,” said the other mother....

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it – water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about...

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost...

He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something.

People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with...

I watch with envious eyes and mind, the single-souled who dare not feelThe wind that blows beyond the moon, who do not hear the fairy reel

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

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

It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation...

I think that there should have been some nice wumpires,” said my sister, wistfully. “Nice, handsome, misunderstood wumpires.””There were not,” said my father.

Believe,” said the rumbling voice. “If you are to survive, you must believe.””Believe what?” asked Shadow. “What should I believe?”He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes...

Hell is something you carry with you.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or...

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

Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded...

I, on the other hand,

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....

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.

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

Bod shrugged. “So?” he said. “It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing....

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...

So what I want to know is, when I’m asleep, do I really remember how to fly? And forget how when I wake up? Or am I just dreaming I can fly?””When you dream, sometimes...

It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else...

The ocean was back in the pond, and the only knowledge I was left with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer’s day, was that it had not been long ago...

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats

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...

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes…you’re Doing Something.

I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even...

I don’t know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get...

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.

Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return…

So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o’...

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and...

The Marquis sighed. “I thought it was just a legend,” he said. “Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City.”Old Bailey nodded, sagely: “What, the big white buggers? They’re down there. I had...

It’s a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree,...

I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can....

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines...