Neverwhere

You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

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.

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.

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

So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.

When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel.

The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.

So many things to see, people to do.

There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.

Richard did not believe in angels, he never had. He was damned if he was going to start now. Still, it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name.

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

I'm going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.

Richard wrote a diary entry in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiancée, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancée, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly.

Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...

She smiled again. "Do you like cat?" she said. "Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats." Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh?" she asked, "or breast?

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.

Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.

He..." Richard began. "The marquis. Well, you know, to be honest, he seems a little bit dodgy to me." Door stopped. The steps dead-ended in a rough brick wall. "Mm," she agreed. "He's a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur.

What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

Can I help you?" said the footman. Richard had been told to fuck off and die with more warmth and good humor.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.

Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

What's it like then?" asked Old Bailey. "Being dead?" The marquis sighed. And then he twisted his lips up into a smile, and with a glitter of his old self, he replied, "Live long enough, Old Bailey, and you can find out for yourself.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

I already killed you once today, what does it take to teach some people?

Rubbish!" screamed a fat, elderly woman, in Richard's ear, as he passed her malodorous stall. "Junk!" She continued. "Garbage! Trash! Offal! Debris! Come and get it! Nothing whole or undamaged! Crap, tripe, and useless piles of shit. You know you want it.

We have to get the... the thing I got... to the Angel. And then he'll tell Door about her family, and he'll tell me how to get home." Lamia looked at Hunter with delight. "And he can give you brains," she said, cheerfully, "and me a heart.