"Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue."
— Neil Gaiman

"I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said.... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"Maybe they know what I know, that the true way to a man's heart is six inches of metal between his ribs. Sometimes four inches will do the job, but to be really sure, I like to have six."
— Laurell K. Hamilton (Narcissus in Chains)

""Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?" Anita Blake"
— Laurell K. Hamilton (Danse Macabre)

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life."
— Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
— Terry Pratchett

"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it."
— Terry Pratchett

"He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower."
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned by no later than the date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"So long and thanks...for all the fish!"
— Douglas Adams

"The answer to life, the universe, and everything, is 42"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
— William Ford Gibson

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
— William Ford Gibson

"America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions."
— Bruce Sterling (Distraction)

"[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."
— Clive Barker

"Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred. "
— Clive Barker

"I have the heart of a small boy...and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
— Stephen King

""Nobody likes a clown at midnight""
— Stephen King

"Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."
— Stephen King

"He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?"
— Margaret Atwood

"Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't."
— Michael Chabon (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh)

"The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day."
— Michael Chabon (Summerland)

"What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?"
— Richard Ford (Independence Day)

"I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
"
— Richard Ford

"There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime..."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"[It is]better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses."
— John Irving

"If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man."
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?"
— Alice Munro

"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."
— Alice Munro (The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose)

"He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. "
— Alice Munro (Away from Her)