Neverwhere Quotes

“There was still the wreckage of that man in there somewhere. That was what made him so terrible, and so sad.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard opened his hand, and the key stared up at him from his palm. "By my crooked teeth," asked Richard, remembering, "who am I?”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect;”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“...he realized how much he wanted to take her pain away”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard's parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived this evening without a confirmed reservation, even they would be turned out into the street with a continental jeer.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard paused for a moment. If ever, he decided, they made disorganization an Olympic sport, he could be disorganized for Britain.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“There was no moon, but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness,”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“When angels go bad, Richard, they go worse than anyone. Remember, Lucifer used to be an angel.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard made a break for it. 'Sorry,' he said to the stunned guard, as he yanked his arm out of the man's grip, and fled. 'Wrong London.' ”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard had met Jessica in France, on a weekend trip to Paris two years earlier; had in fact discovered her in the Louvre, trying to find the group of his office friends who had organized the trip. Staring up at an immense sculpture, he had stepped backwards into Jessica, who was admiring an extremely large and historically important diamond. He tried to apologize to her in French, which he did not speak, gave up, and began to apologize in English, then tried to apologize in French for having to apologize in English, until he noticed that Jessica was about as English as it was possible for any one person to be.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane. You know?”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Things like that, they're too vicious to die.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Darkness is happening," said the leather woman, very quietly. "Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Skies, thought Old Bailey, in a satisfied sort of a way. Never a two of them alike. Not by day nor not by night, neither.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“And then he was silent; and from far above they heard the sounds of crows flying, cawing angrily. "Crows. Family Corvidae. Collective noun," intoned Mr. Croup, relishing the sound of the word. "a murder.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“The next morning he boarded the train for the six-hour journey south that would bring him to the strange gothic spires and arches of St. Pancras Station. His mother gave him a small walnut cake that she had made for the journey and a thermos filled with tea; and Richard Mayhew went to London feeling like hell.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names—Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch—and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“So life isn't exciting?" continued Gary. "Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight. I'll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?" He turned and looked at Richard.

Richard nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“that was okay. Nice food. And no one was trying to kill us.” “I’m sure that will remedy itself as the day goes on,” said Hunter, accurately.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Mr. Croup began to laugh. It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?” “What?” Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything. “Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“To say that Richard Mayhew was not very good at heights would be perfectly accurate, but would fail to give the full picture; it would be like describing the planet Jupiter as bigger than a duck.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“He's a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur but he'll be there.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“With each successive pint he found that he was enjoying himself significantly less; until now he was sitting and shivering on the sidewalk outside the pub in a small Scottish town, weighing the relative merits of being sick and not being sick, and not enjoying himself at all.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth . . .”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“He thought about going out and buying a Sunday paper but decided not to. Arnold Stockton, Jessica’s boss, a many-chinned, self-made caricature of a man, owned all the Sunday papers that Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy. His own papers talked about him, and so did the rest. Reading a Sunday paper would, Richard suspected, probably end up reminding him of the dinner had failed to attend on Friday night. So instead Richard had a long hot bath and a number of sandwiches, and several cups of tea.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere