Neil Gaiman Quotes

“Coraline hesitated. She turned back. Her other mother and her other father were walking towards her, holding hands. They were looking at her with their black button eyes.”

“Then she hugged her mother so tightly that her arms began to ache. Her mother hugged Coraline back.”

“She said, ‘You know that I love you.’

And, despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold.”

“A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only...”

“From the corner of her eye she saw something bone white scamper from one tree trunk to another, closer and closer. She forced herself not to look at it.”

“Coraline shook her head. ‘Why don’t you play with me?’ she asked.

‘Busy,’ he said. ‘Working,’ he added. He still hadn’t turned around to look at her.”

″‘You don’t frighten me,’ said Coraline, although they did frighten her, very much. ‘I want my parents back.‘”

″‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, <em>that’s</em> brave.‘”

″‘We’ll see you soon, though,’ said her other father. ‘When you come back.’

‘Um,’ said Coraline.

‘And then we’ll all be together as one big, happy family,’ said her other mother. ‘For ever and always.‘”

“Coraline was too close to stop, and she felt the other mother’s cold arms enfold her. She stood there, rigid and trembling as the other mother held her tightly.”

″‘In danger?’ thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really.”

″‘Yes, dear. Now, I think you could do with some more hair clips, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, let’s say half a dozen, to be on the safe side, ‘said her mother.
Coraline didn’t say anything.”

“She crept back into the silent house, past the closed bedroom door inside which the other mother and the other father [...] what? she wondered. Slept? Waited?”

“He had his back to her, but she knew, just on seeing him, that his eyes, when he turned around, would be her father’s kind gray eyes, and she crept over and kissed him on the back of his balding head.”

“Dinner was pizza, and even though it was homemade by her father [...] Coraline ate the entire slice she had been given.

Well, she ate everything except for the pineapple chunks.”

″‘I’m an explorer,’ said Coraline out loud, but her words sounded muffled and dead on the misty air. She had made it out of the cellar, hadn’t she?”

“Her long white fingers fluttered gently, like a tired butterfly, and Coraline shivered.”

“There was nothing else there in the mirror. Just her, in the corridor.

A hand touched her shoulder, and she looked up. The other mother stared down at Coraline with big black button eyes.”

″‘No,’ said Coraline quietly, ‘I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.‘”

“All alone, in the middle of the night, Coraline began to cry. There was no other sound in the empty flat.”

“I gain my freedom on the day the moon loses her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together. I await it with patience.”

“The chain? It binds me to the stall. I am the personal slave of the witch-woman who owns the stall. She caught me many years ago, luring me on and on in the form of a pretty frog always but a moment out of my reach, until I had left my father’s lands, unwittingly, whereupon she resumed her true shape and popped me into a sack.”

“The old man pulled free of his sons, and stood straight and tall, then. He was, for a heartbeat, the lord of Stormhold who had defeated the Northern Goblins at the battle of Cragland’s Head; who had fathered eight children who had killed each of his four brothers in combat, before he was twenty years old.”

“While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been.”

“I swore, by the compact of the Sisterhood, that I would do you no harm. Had I not so sworn I would change you into a black-beetle, and I would pull your legs off, one by one, and leave you for the birds to find, for putting me to this indignity.”

“There is something of the dormouse in him still. Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it.”

“The wind blew from Faerie and the East, and Tristran Thorn suddenly found inside himself a certain amount of courage he had not suspected that he had possessed.”

“His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.”

“But there are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet. Not to mention all the wrongs to right, villains to vanquish, sights to see, all that.”

“If only we knew where the truth path was even a serewood couldn’t destroy the true path. Just hide it from us, lure us off of it.”

“Because,” she told him, her voice taut, “now that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go.”

“Tristran Thorn, at the age of seventeen, and only six months older than Victoria, was halfway between a boy and a man, and was equally uncomfortable in either role; he seemed to be composed chiefly of elbows and Adam’s apples.”

“But the youth of today were a pasty lot, with none of the get-up-and-go, none of the vigor and vim that he remembered from the days when he was young”

“If I but had my true youth again why, in the dawn of the world I could transform mountains into seas and clouds into palaces. I could populate cities with the pebbles on the shingle. If I were young again...”

“Say,” said a small and hairy voice in his ear, “but would you mind dreamin’ a bit quieter?”

“They left the inn behind them, the howls of the witch-queen ringing in their ears. They were underground, and the candlelight flickered from the wet cave walls; and with their next halting step they were in a desert of white sand, in the moonlight; and with their third step they were high above the earth, looking down on the hills and trees and rivers far below them.”

“There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.”

“Because,” announced Tristran, “every lover is in his heart a madman, and in his head a minstrel.”

“Tristran stared at her in honest puzzlement. “But I have no wish to be a lord of anywhere,” he told her, “or of anything, except perhaps my lady’s heart.” And he took the star’s hand in his, and he pressed it to his breast and smiled.”