Letter #21: Dragons, Tiny Windows, and Poets

Or, quotes from the word crafter himself, Neil Gaiman

May 28, 2022

Just a quick little notice before we get into today’s post, buuuttt… this newsletter turns 1-Year-Old on May 30th! While I hadn’t planned to write anything specific in regards to that milestone, I just realized the date of my first post is coming up and thought I’d make mention of it here as a smol yay. On with the show!

Dear readers,

It was in searching out a fitting Quote of the Week for my last letter that I ran into so many stunning quotes from Neil Gaiman that I just had to make a letter about just his quotes (much like my Oscar Wilde letter of the same concept).

You’ve likely heard of him, but if not (or if you want a refresher), he co-wrote the glorious Good Omens (I will forever editorialize about this book) with Sir Terry Pratchett, along with writing the (wildly? yeah, wildly) famous The Sandman saga, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Stardust, Art Matters, Neverwhere, The Ocean At the End of the Lane, and Norse Mythology, only to name the majority of his most popular works. Absolutely prolific writer.

I’ve read a fair bit of his work, which I find falls into a similar vein as someone like G. K. Chesterton to me. Sure, their subject matter vastly differs, but their work leaves me with the same impression: every so often, you come upon a phrase, a sentence, a quote that is so profound. A turn of phrase I’ve never heard. Often something small but poignant. They each have (and had, in dear Mr. Chesterton’s case) the ability to convey a feeling in the most unique, out-of-the-box-but-incredibly-true sort of way.

Proof? Read on.

Some Stunning Quotes from Neil Gaiman:

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” -from Coraline
Perhaps one of the more famous quotes, this is one that Gaiman based off a G.K. Chesterton quote as he wrote Coraline. The quote is often associated closely with Neil Gaiman, Sir Terry Pratchett, and G. K. Chesterton, but seeing as Gaiman and Pratchett were writer-friends who dedicated Good Omens to Chesterton, this makes a lot of sense. See the history of the quote on Gaiman’s tumblr here.
“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I see this one on bookmarks all the time!
“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”
“If you only write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not. You have to write when you’re not inspired… The process of writing can be magical… Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.”
“Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”
““[D]on't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...”
“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― with Terry Pratchett, from Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Thought you were getting out of here without a Good Omens quote? Never!
“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“We owe it to each other to tell stories.”
“A philosopher once asked, ‘Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?’ Pointless, really... ‘Do the stars gaze back?’ Now, that's a question.” ― from Stardust
“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands."
“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”
― from American Gods
This is fitting timing, given that I listened to TNO episode 34 recently, finished re-reading Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters for at least the second or third time (in which Annabeth listens to the Sirens for knowledge), and read the first volume of American Gods in the last month.
“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.” ― from American Gods
“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”
“An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.”
― with Terry Pratchett, from Good Omens
My gosh, I adore this descriptor for Crowley. It was one of the very first phrases that made me fall in love with this book and it’s only on the first page of the dramatis personae!
“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”
― from Anansi Boys
“Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.”
― from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.”
― from Neverwhere
“There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
― from American Gods
“Even nothing cannot last forever.”
― from American Gods
“I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr. Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush... ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question.’ Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?”
Alright, has anyone read The King of Infinite Space, the modern Hamlet retelling that was going around the Booktok/Booktube/Bookstagram circles for a while a few months to a year ago?
This sounds exactly like something Benjamin (a.k.a. Hamlet) would say! That same frenzied energy, clamoring for, and with, humor and wisdom in a word soup of sorts.
“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”
― from Anansi Boys
“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”
― from Good Omens
“There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. ”
― from The Books of Magic
“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
― from American Gods
“The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.”
― from Coraline
“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.”
― from American Gods
“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”
― from American Gods
“We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.”
― from Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

I’ll stop this at 30, as I did with my Oscar Wilde quotes letter, but the list can go on quite infinitely, as people discover more chestnuts throughout the many, many pages Gaiman has written over the years.

There are just too many good quotes I could add. If you’re hungry for more, you can always try the Goodreads quote page for Neil Gaiman, which is where I found most of these (before cross-checking them on other sites too).

A Ghost in the Post

Letter #21: Dragons, Tiny Windows, and Poets

Or, quotes from the word crafter himself, Neil Gaiman

Some Stunning Quotes from Neil Gaiman:

Further Reading