Neil Gaiman · 310 pages
Rating: (40.4K votes)
“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
Neil Gaiman
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“Ash said slowly: ‘I don’t believe that anyone can have no regrets … Perhaps there are times when even God regrets that He created such a thing as man. But one can put them away and not dwell upon them; and I’ll have you, Larla … that alone is enough happiness for any man.’ He”
― M.M. Kaye, quote from The Far Pavilions
“How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring?”
― William Blake, quote from Songs of Innocence and of Experience
“Good memories are like charms...Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.”
― James Patterson, quote from Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas
“The way you move is incredible.” Ren drew me back to press against him. His fingers slid down to the curve of my hips, rocking our bodies in rhythm with the heavy bass. The sensation of being molded against the hard narrow line of his hips threatened to overwhelm me. We were hidden in the mass of people, right? The Keepers couldn’t see?
I tried to steady my breath as Ren kept us locked together in the excruciatingly slow pulse of the music. I closed my eyes and leaned back into his body; his fingers kneaded my hips, caressed my stomach. God, it felt good.
My lips parted and the misty veil slipped between them, playing along my tongue. The taste of flower buds about to burst into bloom filled my mouth. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to melt into Ren. The surge of desire terrified me. I had no idea if the compulsion to draw him more tightly around my body emerged from my own heart or from the succubi’s spellcraft. This couldn’t happen!
I started to panic when he bent his head, pressing his lips against my neck. My eyes fluttered and I struggled to focus despite the suffocating heat that pressed down all around me. His sharpened canines traced my skin, scratching but not breaking the surface. My body quaked and I pivoted in his arms, pushing against his chest, making space between us.
“I’m a fighter, not a lover,” I gasped.
“You can’t be both?” His smile made my knees buckle.”
― Andrea Cremer, quote from Nightshade
“When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.”
― George Eliot, quote from Silas Marner
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