He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.

He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.

It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.