 | Neil Gaiman |
Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they`re scared for the fear to become real.
The day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.
Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way.
You`ve a good heart. [...] Sometimes that`s enough to see you safe wherever you go [...] But mostly, it`s not.
There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren`t what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be.
My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.
My father used to say that the carving was in the wood already. You just had to find out what the wood wanted to be, and then take your knife and remove everything that wasn`t that.
He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn`t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it`s a lie. Books don`t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you`d believe.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.