Trigger Warning Quotes

“There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else’s experience of the story.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I sometimes imagine I would like my ashes to be scattered in a library. But then the librarians would just have to come in early the next morning to sweep them up again, before the people got there.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The monsters in our cupboards and our minds are always there in the darkness, like mould beneath the floorboards and behind the wallpaper, and there is so much darkness, an inexhaustible supply of darkness. The universe is amply supplied with night.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You seem all normal and quiet on the surface. But you are so much weirder than I am, and I am, extremely, fucking, weird.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The witch was as old as the mulberry tree
She lived in the house of a hundred clocks
She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea
And she kept her life in a box.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You're very good. Are you a professional artist?"

"I dabble," she said.

Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.” Calum”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“This is what they say:
Secure your own mask before helping others.
And i think of us, all the people, and the masks we wear, the masks we hide behind and the masks that reveal.
I imagine people pretending to be what they truly are, and discovering that other people are so much more and so much less than they imagined themselves to be or present themselves as. And then, I think about the need to help others, and how we mask ourselves to do it, and how unmasking makes us vulnerable...
We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“They never get easier, never stop my heart from trip-trapping, never let me escape, this time, unscathed. But they teach me things, and they open my eyes, and if they hurt, they hurt in ways that make me think and grow and change.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I am sorry. I lost something there. Like a path I was walking that dead-ended, and now I am alone and lost in the forest, and I am here and I do not know where here is any more.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe'en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.

I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I was once a blank piece of parchment too, waiting to be inscribed. I learned about things and people from stories, and I learned about other authors from stories.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“VI. FINAL WARNING There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle. There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. (In my second short-story collection, Fragile Things, I tried to explain that the poems come free. They are bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.) There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labeled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn't looking.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I have lost people, though.
It's strange when it happens. I don't actually lose them. Not in the way one loses one's parents, either as a small child, when you think you are holding your mother's hand in a crowd and then you look up, and it's not your mother... or later. When you have to find the words to describe them at a funeral service or a memorial, or when you are scattering ashes on a garden of flowers or into the sea.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances