1. “You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.”
2. “Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.”
3. “There’s not much high and low culture any more: there’s just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it’s good art or bad art.”
4. “Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.”
5. “Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”
6. “You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.”
7. “It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will take a graveyard.”
8. “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.”
9. “Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it.”
10. “To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”
11. “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
12. “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.”
13. “Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.”
14. “You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.”
15. “Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.”
16. “Where magic is concerned, there is always an initial decision, an initial willingness to let it enter your life. If that is not there neither is magic.”
17. “If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
18. “For some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless tree and dance on nothing until dancing was done.”
19. “It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?”
20. “If you can’t be happy where you are, you can’t be happy anywhere.”
21. “And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.”
22. “You can’t make me love you.”
23. “When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.”
24. “The price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted.”
25. “I am only alive when I perceive a challenge.”
26. “Her long white fingers fluttered gently, like a tired butterfly, and Coraline shivered.”
27. “Biting’s excellent. It’s like kissing – only there is a winner.”
28. “Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.”
29. “You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”
30. “Life and death are different sides of the same coin.”
31. “Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.”
32. “Even nothing cannot last forever.”
33. “I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.”
34. “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
35. “The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.”
36. “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.”
37. “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.”
38. “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
39. “God who knows all things, I have no prayer book and I do not know any prayers by heart. But you know all the prayers. You are God. So this is what I am going to do. I am going to say the alphabet, and I will let you put the words together.”
40. “You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.”
41. “Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.”
42. “If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.”
43. “There was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway.”
44. “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.”
45. “I love stories where women save themselves.”
46. “Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you’re waiting for someone to publish the first thing…”
47. “Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious.”
48. “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.”
49. “The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”
50. “You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.”
51. “Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.”
52. “The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.”
53. “That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.”
54. “I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.”
55. “Some skills can be attained by education, and some by practice, and some by time. Those skills will come if you study. Soon enough you will master Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. But some skills cannot be mastered by the living, and for those you must wait a little longer.”
56. “Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.”
57. “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.”
58. “I’ve been inspired by dreams – I’ve even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.”
59. “A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.”
60. “Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”
61. “If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.”
62. “From meetings and partings none can ever escape. Nor from magic.”
63. “I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.”
64. “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”
65. “The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.”
66. “Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”
67. “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.”
68. “You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.”
69. “I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars…”
70. “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.”
71. “Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”
72. “Remember your name. Do not lose hope – what you seek will be found.”
73. “When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”
74. “There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.”
75. “I’ll find you. Don’t worry. Just be on your own and I’ll find you.”
76. “Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.”
77. “The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.”
78. “My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet.”
79. “The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.”
80. “You’ve a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.”
81. “Dreams shape the world.”
82. “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”
83. “Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.”
84. “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”
85. “There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
86. “Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.”
87. “A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.”
88. “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
89. “They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.”
90. “Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you’re a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.”
91. “Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
92. “When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art.”
93. “What do stars do? They shine.”
94. “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.”
95. “There’s none so blind as those who will not listen.”
96. “I know that this is the internet, and we’re all anonymous and all that, but really. It doesn’t hurt to try to be nice.”
97. “The view changes from where you are standing. Words can wound, and wounds can heal. All of these things are true.”
98. “She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”
99. “Face your life Its pain, its pleasure, Leave no path untaken” “Leave no path untaken,” repeated Bod. “A difficult challenge, but I can try my best.”
100. “It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to let it go.”
101. “When you love something you just don’t want to stop talking about it.”
102. “Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes…”
103. “You hurt. It’s okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.”
104. “Walk any path in Destiny’s garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.”
105. “We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.”
106. “I know not whether you came to me or I to you. Not whether it was a dream, asleep or awake. I am lost in the darkness of a downcast heart. Dream or reality. Let it be decided tonight.”
107. “Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.”
108. “Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.”
109. “If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”
110. “Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope.”
111. “The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”
112. “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
113. “Words save our lives, sometimes.”
114. “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
115. “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”
116. “I make things up and write them down.”
117. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
118. “Fear is contagious. You can catch it.”
119. “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”
120. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you’re doing something.”
121. “The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.”
122. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
123. “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”
124. “You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
125. “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.”