“I really don't know what "I love you" means. I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.”

“And there was a voice, a high clear, female voice, which said "Ow", and then, very quietly, it said "Fuck", and then it said "Ow", once more.”

“Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?”

“You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly. 'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.”

“I'm going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.”

“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?”

“I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.”

“She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.”

“Don't start anything you're not prepared to finish.”

“You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman.”

“The only water in the forest is the River.”

“Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they're scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too. ”

“Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.”

“Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?”

“I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.”

“Let's start a new tomorrow, today.”

“He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring because yesterday has brought it.”

“Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?”

“He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”

“So many things to see, people to do.”

“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.”

“A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.”