Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

"people tell you so much more when they know you're just about to be dead . and then they talk around you, when you are."

"Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries. 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 need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind."

"Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight."

"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."

"After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place..."

"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane."

"What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want"What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want"Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth."

"The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. "What a refreshing mind you have, young man," he said. "There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?"

"She smiled again. "Do you like cat" she said."Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats."Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh" she asked, "or breast?"

"That's right," said Door. Her cheek lightly grazed and her dirty reddish hair was tangled; tangled but not matted. And her eyes... Richard realized that he could not tell what color her eyes were. They were not blue, or green, or brown, or gray; they reminded him of fire opals: there were burning greens and blues, and even reds and yellows that vanished and glinted as she moved."

"Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare."

"The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke. There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face. It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more. And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it."

"I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats"

"What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?"

"The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen."

"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."

"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."

"So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. (Quindi il giorno divenne un giorno d'attesa, cosa che era, lo sapeva bene, un peccato: i momenti devono essere sperimentati; aspettare è un peccato contro il tempo che deve ancora venire e contro gli istanti presenti che vengono trascurati.)"

"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..."

"Sometimes there is nothing you can do."