Thad > Thad's Quotes

“You're also finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this: THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things. - Mr. Nancy”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods: Tenth Anniversary

“Listen. We have always had Sacrifices and they have always done their duty without question. But in the days and years ahead, we need something different. We need Builders”
― Tad Williams, The Heart of What Was Lost

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY - MAN

“It's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea."

"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow.

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“My mother was mad, as I suppose I too am now mad. What else can people be who have their entire lives snatched away from them, and for no greater crime than being what they are? The choking, stifling unfairness of it is a permanent sore -- one that can be lived with but never forgotten.”
― Tad Williams, Caliban's Hour

“The solitary mind probes at an ugly thought as a wound, constantly seeing if the pain is less, and in doing so keeps it alive beyond is time.”
― Tad Williams, Caliban's Hour

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
― Alan Watts

“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to a million’. With individual stories, the statistics become people – but even then that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child. And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad of squirming children?”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods