1- “Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
2- Mr. World : Tell the believers and the non-believers. Tell them we’ve taken the spring. They can have it back when they pray for it.
3- I accept my worship my way and I grow in power. The choice is yours. Evolve or die.
4- Bilquis : Love and war may sit on opposite sides of a coin but only so they may never meet.
5- Bilquis : “People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.”
6- Mr. Nancy : “It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”
7- Mad Sweeney : “You’re walking on gallows ground, and there’s a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.”
8- Shadow’s mother : Scientists call it hormesis, a little bit of poison to make you stronger. Your light is strong, my beautiful son.
9- Mr. World : Never, ever let anyone know I said this but sometimes, the old ways are the best. There’s nothing like a knife in the back for close-up efficiency.
10- Wednesday : So, over the centuries, people in other countries felt called to places of power. They knew there was an energy there, a focus point, a channel, a window to the imminent, and they built churches, cathedrals, or they’d erect a stone circle. Well, you get the idea.
11- Mr. World : Your gods see you as a traitor, complicit in the death of their kin. And you shun the gods of progress. So I wonder if you don’t choose a side, will you be trampled by both?
12- Wednesday : Great battles require great preparation.
13- Wednesday : Believing is seeing. Gods are real if you believe in them.
14- All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.
15- “Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”
16- Wednesday : The only thing that scares me is being forgotten. I can survive most things, but not that.
17- Bilquis : You invited the Old Gods to the party. I was old in the desert before they sacrificed the first horse to you. I will be heard.
18- The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience.
19- What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.
20- Shadow Moon : “There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.”
21- Shadow : I’ve crossed enough paths to know that one in four people are rock stupid. Even the smart ones believe in delusions, whether it’s gods or ghosts.
22- “If Hell is other people, thought Shadow, then Purgatory is airports.”
23- World : Then I have to put the fear of me into some old gods. Let them feel shock and awe. Pain and grief. Let them know what real sacrifice feels like.
24- He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.
25- Even nothing cannot last forever.
ads