A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
Neil GaimanRead
Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Sharing pain can lighten the burden of suffering.
In this quote, Neil Gaiman emphasizes the importance of sharing one's emotional burdens with others. By openly acknowledging and confronting our feelings of pain together, it becomes more manageable and less isolating. The phrase 'No man is an island' reinforces the idea that we are inherently social beings who find strength and solace in community and companionship during difficult times.
Themes
PainSharingCommunityMortalitySupport
In practice
Example use cases
In a support group meeting where participants discuss personal losses.
More from Neil Gaiman
All quotes →Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith." "You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.
Neil GaimanRead
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
Neil GaimanRead
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.
Neil GaimanRead
Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.
Neil GaimanRead
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.
Neil GaimanRead
Similar quotes
The opinion of the world does not affect me. I have placed as the real values in my life what follows when I am dead.
Nikola TeslaRead
People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
Erich FrommRead
The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.
Mary BeardRead
I know nothing and my heart aches
Fernando PessoaRead
The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead