John Connolly

She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.

Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.

If cats could count, they__ start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.

And Nurd, who had never had a mother and father, and who had never loved or been loved, marvelled at the ways in which feeling so wonderful could also leave one open to so much pain. In a strange way, he envied Samuel even that. He wanted to care about someone so much that it could hurt.

What's seldom is wonderful.

They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.

Why did you shoot him?""You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.

A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer

Slow animals always become prey in the end.

And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power lay always in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle...

There was a lot to be said for a man__ capacity to be comfortable while alone.

We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere.""Where, Purgatory?" said Dozy. "We're in Hell.

The law doesn't require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that's acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies.--Elwin Stark

You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don__ do fractions.

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

Perhaps it's true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.

Story!" The dwarf snorted. "You'll be talking about "happily ever after" next. Do we look happy? There's no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like.

Stories come alive in the telling. (_)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.