Neil Gaiman

For some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless tree and dance on nothing until dancing was done.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

It's easier to believe in aliens than in gods.

He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.

You can't run away from home without destroying somebody's world.

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 darkness.

The moonlight was enough. It would do.

And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.

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

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.

How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

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.

Diana used to tell me she had a travel jinx, something I only really started to believe when the plane door fell off.

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.

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 and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.

And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they're meant to.

I suppose I could claim that I had suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already know the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now I know the truth, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.

I remembered something somebody had once said to me. It's okay. Everyday is freshly ground.