Quotes from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else’s experience of the story.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I sometimes imagine I would like my ashes to be scattered in a library. But then the librarians would just have to come in early the next morning to sweep them up again, before the people got there.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The monsters in our cupboards and our minds are always there in the darkness, like mould beneath the floorboards and behind the wallpaper, and there is so much darkness, an inexhaustible supply of darkness. The universe is amply supplied with night.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You seem all normal and quiet on the surface. But you are so much weirder than I am, and I am, extremely, fucking, weird.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You're very good. Are you a professional artist?"

"I dabble," she said.

Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.” Calum”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The witch was as old as the mulberry tree
She lived in the house of a hundred clocks
She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea
And she kept her life in a box.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“They never get easier, never stop my heart from trip-trapping, never let me escape, this time, unscathed. But they teach me things, and they open my eyes, and if they hurt, they hurt in ways that make me think and grow and change.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I was once a blank piece of parchment too, waiting to be inscribed. I learned about things and people from stories, and I learned about other authors from stories.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I am sorry. I lost something there. Like a path I was walking that dead-ended, and now I am alone and lost in the forest, and I am here and I do not know where here is any more.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“He was drowning in the Time, could feel it crushing him, like an ancient forest being crushed into oil.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“VI. FINAL WARNING There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle. There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. (In my second short-story collection, Fragile Things, I tried to explain that the poems come free. They are bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.) There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labeled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people’s wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I am only alive when I perceive a challenge.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“that feeling I get when I go looking in my head for a word that isn’t there, as if someone must have come and taken it in the night.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

About the author

Popular quotes

“A thousand moments that I had just taken for granted- mostly because I had assumed that there would be a thousand more.”
― Morgan Matson, quote from Second Chance Summer

“But revenge is hollow. I'd prefer amnesia.”
― Tera Lynn Childs, quote from Oh. My. Gods.

“I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever.”
― Sue Townsend, quote from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4

“It's easy to become anything you wish . . . so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul.”
― Gene Luen Yang, quote from American Born Chinese

“In the morning, fog. As it slowly lifted, the expedition set off.”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, quote from Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.