Neil Gaiman

First and foremost, my thanks to Charles Vess. He is the nearest thing we have today to the great Victorian fairy painters, and without his art as an inspiration none of these words would exist.

Stand, or we die now.

Billy lowered his head and ran, headlong, at the unicorn, as if he were about to butt it with his forehead. The unicorn lowered its head also, and Billy the Innkeeper met his unfortunate end.

Have been unavoidably detained by the world.

Expect us when you see us.

A question like 'How big is Faerie?' does not admit of a simple answer.

Faerie, after all, is not one land, one principality or dominion. Maps of Faerie are unreliable, and may not be depended upon.

We talk of the kings and queens of Faerie as we would speak of the kings and queens of England. But Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn't there has taken refuge in Faerie; so it is now, by the time that we come to write of it, a most huge place indeed, containing every manner of landscape and terrain). Here, truly, there be dragons. Also gryphons, wyverns, hippogriffs, basilisks, and hydras. There are all manner of more familiar animals as well, cats affectionate and aloof, dogs noble and cowardly, wolves and foxes, eagles and bears.

He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.

She had a unicorn to protect her. Now I have the unicorn's head, and I will bring it back with me, for it's long enough since we had fresh ground unicorn's horn in our arts

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks.

"She is still in Faerie. But she is going to the Market at Wall, and that is too close to the world on the other side of the wall. Once she goes into that world, she will be lost to us".

For they each of them knew that, were the star to cross the wall and enter the world of things as they are, she would become, in an instant, no more than a pitted lump of metallic rock that had fallen, once, from the heavens: cold and dead and of no more use to them.

Tori lent me a house, and I wrote the first chapter in it, and all she asked in exchange was that I make her a tree.

"Everything I ever thought about myself—who I was, what I am—was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels".

The witch-queen pulled her body from the horn, and, one hand gripping her wounded shoulder, the other holding her cleaver, she staggered to her feet.

Her eyes scanned the room, alighting on Tristran and the star huddled by the fire. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she lurched toward them, a cleaver in her hand and a smile upon her face.

"The burning golden heart of a star at peace is so much finer than the flickering heart of a little frightened star", she told them, her voice oddly calm and detached, coming, as it was, from that blood-bespattered face. "But even the heart of a star who is afraid and scared is better by far than no heart at all".