American Gods Quotes

“Kinds of behavior that work in a specialized environment, such as a prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.”

“Call no man happy until he is dead.”

″‘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 filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth. ‘Everything,’ roared the buffalo man.”

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills”

“Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn’t feel anything at all.”

“It all depends on where you are.”

“The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself.”

“A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen.”

“We rode here in their minds, and we took root.”

“I’m doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf.”

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

“There was part of him that felt gently exhilarated: he had done something.”

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

“Its like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love. It takes a lot of people believing just the tiniest bit to sustain us.”

″‘And as for keeping my word, well, these preliminary talks are being filmed and broadcast live,’ and he gestured back toward the camera. ‘Some of your people are watching as we speak. Others will see video-tapes. Others will be told, by those they trust. The camera does not lie.’ ‘Everybody lies,’ said Wednesday.”

″‘Not only are there no happy endings,’ she told him, ‘there aren’t even any endings.‘”

“Rigged games are the easiest ones to beat.”

“This is not a good country for gods.”

“It’s true what they say, thought Shadow. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.”

“Shadow was not superstitious. He did not believe in anything he could not see.”