Neil Gaiman

It was cold, in a way that Shadow was starting to become familiar with: colder inside the building than out. He wondered how they did that, if it was a British building secret.

She does not know where any tale waits

before it's told. (No more do I.)

But forty thieves sounds good, so forty

thieves it is. She prays she's bought another clutch of days.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

“It can’t make things any worse.”

“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend.

Nothing good lasts forever, after all. Sooner or later, as Grahame Coats himself would have delighted in assuring you, even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked.

“You, Charles. The police suspect you.”

“Yes,” said Fat Charlie. “Of course they do. It’s been that sort of a day.”

Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke. From this moment on, he suspected, nothing would surprise him. He could no longer be outweirded. He was done.

He was wrong, of course.

He was having second thoughts about all this, something Spider found fairly disconcerting. Normally he didn’t even have first thoughts about things.

Spider was not particularly good at telling the truth. He regarded truth as fundamentally malleable, more or less a matter of opinion, and Spider was able to muster some pretty impressive opinions when he had to.

“So you met the Bird Woman, and...?”

“She offered to make you go away. And, um. Well, I took her up on it.”

“That,” said Spider, with a movie-star smile, “was really stupid.”

“I didn’t tell her to hurt you.”

“What did you think she was going to do to get rid of me? Write me a stiff letter?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think. I was upset.”

“Great. Well, if she has her way, you’ll be upset, and I’ll be dead. You could have just asked me to leave, you know.”

“I did!”

“Er. What did I say?”

“That you liked it in my house and you weren’t going anywhere.”

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

Together the man and the boy danced their way back up the sand to the house, singing a wordless song that they made up as they went along, which lingered in the air even after they had gone in for breakfast.

“I’ll putting her down for table H,” said Rosie’s mother. “She’ll be more comfortable there.” She said it in the same way most people would say things like, “Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”