I've never read any of his books (not yet anyway, though there's a large number of them on my list), but he is the author of my current favorite quote (in fact favorite enough that it's been a fleeting thought to make it a next tattoo)....
"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."
Just out of curiosity, I did a google search for "Neil Gaiman quotes"....and hit the jackpot. So, so, so many lovely, lovely words, strung together in such funny, touching, beautiful, profound ways. His books just jumped to the top of my To Read list.
In no certain order, here are some of my favorites.....
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. they didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
(from "The Kindly Ones")
"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. they don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
(from "The Kindly Ones")
"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")
"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. 'It's all right' we whisper, 'I'm here, I love you.' and we lie: 'I'll never leave you.' For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."
(from "Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days")
"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."
(from "Good Omens")
"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dream, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas - abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken - and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."
(from "Fragile Things")
AND
"I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time."
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