We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. I...
We all have stories. Or perhaps it's because, as humans, we are already an assemblage of stories and the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, sk...
Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.'I think...I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.''If he didn't care about y...
Trolls can smell the rainbow, trolls can smell the stars. Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born.
Think of us as symbols—we’re the dream that humanity creates to make sense of the shadows on the cave wall.
Things. They came up. That what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all
There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the facel...
There was something empty at the bottom of all her words.
There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.
There are things that upset us. That’s not quite what we’re talking about here, though. I’m thinking rather about those images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of...
There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply....
The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue.
The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.
The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn’t want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance...
The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity...
The man Jack was tall. This man was taller. The man Jack wore dark clothes. This man’s clothes were darker. People who noticed the man Jack when he was about his business-- and he did not like to be n...
The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss. 'Pock! There,' said Czernobog. 'Is done.' There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen bef...
The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.
The fun comes in telling them yourself—something I warmly encourage you to do, you person reading this. Read the stories in this book, then make them your own,