Anansi Boys (American Gods, #2)

by Neil Gaiman

Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. 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.

It was the kind of sky that makes even the most prosaic person discover a deeply buried urge to start painting in oils.

Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one’s bottom.

Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.

silence. He started to wonder about silences. Was the silence of the grave different in kind to the silence of, say, outer space?

The important thing about songs is that they’re just like stories. They don’t mean a damn unless there’s people listenin’ to them.”