Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable.
"Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
One thing I've learned. You can know anything. It's all there. You just have to find it.
Neil Gaiman in The Sandman - Dream a Little Dream of Me
All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone,
We must speak of other matters,
You can be me when I'm gone
Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on,
Still are withered in the evening,
You can be me when I'm gone.
Fading is the sun that shone,
We must speak of other matters,
You can be me when I'm gone
Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on,
Still are withered in the evening,
You can be me when I'm gone.
Neil Gaiman in The Sandman - The Kindly Ones
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable.
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.
All the reading she had done had given her a view of life they had never seen.
Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would, I'd never leave.
You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.
"Sometimes," said Pooh, "the smallest things take up the most room in your heart."
You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.
Stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.