“Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”

“It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.”

“I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.”

“What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.”

“That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.”

“And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.”

“There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.”

“I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”

“Can't make an omelette without killing a few people.”

“If you were to try and pick him out of a group of boys, you’d be wrong. He’d be the other one. Over at the side. The one your eye slipped over.”

“We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.”

“You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

“Mind the gap!”

“There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.”

“What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?"

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”

“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.”

“It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is”

“The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.”

“Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.”

“People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.”

“He said nothing: seldom do those who are silent make mistakes.”

“Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.”

“And he waited. It was only for a few seconds, but it felt like a small forever.”