I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.

I'll find you. Don't worry. Just be on your own and I'll find you.

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It's that something's going on in your head, and you can't control it. I mean, It's like there's these bad worlds inside you. But it's just you... it's like you're betraying yourself.

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.