Quotes From "Anansi Boys" By Neil Gaiman

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along. Neil Gaiman

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. Neil Gaiman

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time. Neil Gaiman

Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street. Neil Gaiman

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life, ” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song"..." Curry’s nice too" pointed out Fat Charlie Neil Gaiman

Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island. Neil Gaiman

You know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.’ And this means…?’ Well’, she said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it? Neil Gaiman

I think all - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around. Neil Gaiman

Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. Neil Gaiman

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master. Neil Gaiman

He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.** Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all–except possibly on an organic level–had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night. Neil Gaiman

It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck. Neil Gaiman

Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead. Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware! ” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits. And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details. Neil Gaiman

Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches. Neil Gaiman

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each. Neil Gaiman

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story. Neil Gaiman

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song. Neil Gaiman

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each. What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man. No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all. Neil Gaiman

People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before. Neil Gaiman

That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know. Neil Gaiman

Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie's mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of "Back! Foul best of Hell! " followed by gasps of "Is it alive?" and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers. Neil Gaiman

Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Coffee? Water?" Don't say wax fruit. "Wax fruit?" Damn. Neil Gaiman

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds. Neil Gaiman

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly 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. 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. . Neil Gaiman

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information. Neil Gaiman

Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to. Neil Gaiman

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. Neil Gaiman

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it. Neil Gaiman

I'm a mother, " said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know. Neil Gaiman

Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop." 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. Neil Gaiman

Black as night, sweet as sin. Neil Gaiman

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman... Neil Gaiman

Songs remain. They last... A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs. Neil Gaiman