Best 41 quotes in «american gods quotes» category

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. Gaiman, Neil

We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.

What are gods?" asked the buffalo man. "I don't know," said Shadow.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you can not have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.

And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring the on. The god of guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders.

Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment.

Do you think they're still there?" "Where?" "Greece. Egypt. The islands. Those places. Do you think if you walked where those people walked you'd see the gods?" "Maybe. But I don't think people'd know that was what they'd seen." "I bet it's like space aliens," she said. "These days people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain." "I don't think the gods ever gave rectal probes," said Shadow. "And they didn't mutilate cattle themselves. They got people to do it for them.

Iga tund teeb haiget. Viimane tapab

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

It's there to be admired. It's there to be.

Life's what happens when you're making other plans.

None so blind as those who will not see.

There's none so blind as those who will not listen.

After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn't protect you from something like that?

And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.

Are you sure about this?" he asked. Wednesday snorted. "Sure as eggs is eggs," he said. "As the turkey farmer said when he hatched his first turtle.

Before that no one thought of us as colored-foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.

He grinned, like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence.

He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life's vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.

It's all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow.

It's patterns," he said. "If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama anymore. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?

They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright's evil twin," said Wednesday. "Frank Lloyd Wrong.

Let me tell you something. It can be along time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I'm no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get an half-hour's shut eye...

Look, I don't know why this happened to me. But it's hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive.

Mister whoever-the-fuck you are,” said Shadow, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the engines, “there isn't enough money in the world.

My last girlfriend was Greek,” said the Iceman. “The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that.

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. 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.

Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it.

So you all remember: just because you're small, doesn't mean you got no power.

That’s when I miss you most. When you’re here. When you aren’t here, when you’re just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it’s easier then

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.

Laura made a great chili. She used lean meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice and a pitch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot. He had even written down the recipe, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Laura's chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay-it was certainly edible, but it had not been Laura's chili.

Makes you feel sorry for the gods and goddesses, doesn't it? After their temples fall apart. I wonder what happens to them? Some of them die. Some of them change. And some of them just keep going. Maybe some even get jobs as dancers.

People are in the dark, they don't know what to do Had a little lantern oh but it got blown out too I'm reachin out my hands. I know you are too Cuz I just want to be in the dark with you

Shadow turned, slowly, streaming images of himself as he moved, frozen moments, each him captured in a fraction of a second, every tiny movement lasting for an infinite period. The images that reached his mind made no sense: it was like seeing the world through the multifaceted jewelled eyes of a dragonfly, but each facet saw something completely different, and he was unable to combine the things he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, into a whole that made any sense.

So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.