Dream Country Neil Gaiman Quotes

DREAM ! Dreams shape the world . Dreams create the world anew, every night. Do not dream the world the way it is now, in thrall to our feline masters and mistresses ~ Neil Gaiman

The finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'I know. But it's the only game in town.' And he went back to the game. ~ Neil Gaiman

I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time. And then it turned and I saw its face ... ~ Neil Gaiman

Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale. - LORD CARLISLE, TO GEORGE SELWYN, 1778 ~ Neil Gaiman

To make any future that we dreamt up real requires creative scientists, engineers, and technologists to make it happen. If people are not within your midst who dream about tomorrow - with the capacity to bring tomorrow into the present - then the country might as well just recede back into the cave because that's where we're headed. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The idea that science is just some luxury that you'll get around to if you can afford it is regressive to any future a country might dream for itself. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's. ~ Neil Gaiman

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. And while politicians blame the other party for these results, the truth is, we need to teach our children to read and to enjoy reading. We ~ Neil Gaiman

The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgement. ~ Neil Gaiman

Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence. ~ Neil Gaiman

I fought for America. My country. I protected America. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Democracy. Not something you people have seen much of yet. But it's worth fighting for... ~ Neil Gaiman

Look," said Whiskey Jack. "This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who's going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He'd argue with rocks and the rocks would win. "So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay. ~ Neil Gaiman

there, singing and tapping in the blacksnakes, in the swamp, she has an odd vision. She sees the beats of the songs, the Calinda beat, the Bamboula beat, all the rhythms of equatorial Africa spreading slowly across this midnight land until the whole country shivers and swings to the beats of the old gods whose realms she had left. And even that, she understands somehow, in the swamp, even that will not be enough. ~ Neil Gaiman

In my country we smile in bursts, like the sun coming out and illuminating the fields and then retreating again behind a cloud too soon. Smiles are valuable here. But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. You smiled the first time you saw me, even wider than before. You smiled and I was lost, like a small child in a great forest, never to find its way home again. ~ Neil Gaiman

Coraline's father stopped working and made them all dinner.
Coraline was disgusted. "Daddy," she said, "you've made a recipe again."
"It's leek and potato stew with a tarragon garnish and melted Gruyere cheese," he admitted.
Coraline sighed. Then she went to the freezer and got out some microwave chips and a microwave minipizza.
"You know I don't like recipes," she told her father, while her dinner went around and around and the little red numbers on the microwave oven counted down to zero. ~ Neil Gaiman

I think as a Canadian hockey player, you go through it in your mind so many times, being able to stand on that blue line and hear your national anthem play and being a gold medal champion, you dream of that. And then to be able to accomplish that and actually win a gold medal and represent your country its an amazing feeling. ~ Sidney Crosby

When people do nice things, you should always say thank you. it makes life an awful lot easier. ~ Neil Gaiman

...There is no such thing as grown ups... ~ Neil Gaiman

Do not fear the ghosts in this house; they
are the least of your worries.
Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,
The creaks and footsteps in the night,
their little tricks of hiding things,
or moving them, I find
endearing, not upsettling. It makes the place
feel so much more like a home.
Inhabited. ~ Neil Gaiman

FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES IN THE SECRET HOUSE OF THE NIGHT OF DREAD DESIRE ~ Neil Gaiman

Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you'd answer for your evil deeds and your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we'd feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls"
"He must have eaten a lot of people."
"Not as many as you'd think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had better be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby ... ~ Neil Gaiman

I wish I could purr, too. I would have purred then. ~ Neil Gaiman

Enjoy the things that never happened. ~ Neil Gaiman

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. ~ Neil Gaiman

The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every gray rock in the drystone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving after-images on Shadow's night-blinded eyes. ~ Neil Gaiman

I thought about moving south, about continuing to run, continuing to pretend I was alive. But it was, I knew now, much too late for that. There are doors, after all, between the living and the dead, and they swing in both directions. ~ Neil Gaiman

I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it. ~ Neil Gaiman

In every big-budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it's gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn't have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn't going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput ...
VROOOOSH.
But it was exactly like that anyway. ~ Neil Gaiman

Once upon a time,' is code for 'I'm lying to you.' We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy - that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us. ~ Neil Gaiman

The model for tomorrow, and this is the model I've been using with enormous enthusiasm since I started blogging back in 2001, is to try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago. ~ Neil Gaiman

A god's relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes. ~ Neil Gaiman

A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard's parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived this evening without a confirmed reservation, even they would be turned out into the street with a continental jeer. ~ Neil Gaiman

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.
If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong. ~ Neil Gaiman

Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, ~ Neil Gaiman

Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commits acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them. ~ Neil Gaiman

People think it's how hard you kick that hurts,' Mr Vandemar's voice was saying. 'But it's not how hard you kick. It's where. ~ Neil Gaiman

It's what people do. They believe. And when they will not take responsibilities for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. ~ Neil Gaiman