Neil Gaiman

"What's your name," Coraline asked the cat. "Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?"

"You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall.

"Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."

"How do I know you’ll keep your word?" asked Coraline.

There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others.

Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?

I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look — here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers — many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.