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.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?" "Stories. And they give me hope.

Why does she want me?" Coraline asked the cat. "Why does she want me to stay here with her?" "She wants something to love, I think," said the cat. "Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well. It's hard to tell with creatures like that.

When I was about ten my favourite article in the huge and mouldering Encyclopedia Britannica we owned (the ninth edition) was the one on Lycanthropy. (Yes, I had a favourite 1890s Britannica article when I was ten. I am now aware this is not entirely usual.)

Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked. “Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel. “It’s not always fatal.

I suppose I could claim that I had suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already know the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now I know the truth, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.

There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out.