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Title: American Gods Authors: Neil Gaiman Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 37 Date: 2025-12-12 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Thereâs never been a true war that wasnât fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.â
People believe, thought Shadow. Itâs 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.
And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.â
But it was a dream, and in dreams, sometimes, you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.
All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.
Tags:existentialism,perception
Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
Tags:existentialism,favorite,humility,stoic
âThis isnât about what is,â said Mr. Nancy. âItâs about what people think is. Itâs all imaginary anyway. Thatâs why itâs important. People only fight over imaginary things.â
Tags:social_construct
âNow, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit-card and freeway, of internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.
âThis is the only country in the world,â said Wednesday, into the stillness, âthat worries about what it is.â âWhat?â âThe rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.â
The people had the glazed, beaten look you only see in airports and prisons. If Hell is other people, thought Shadow, then Purgatory is airports.
âHow you want your coffee?â she asked her guests. âHere we take it black as night, sweet as sin.â
Tags:fantasy
âLiberty,â boomed Wednesday, as they walked to his car, âis a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.â
Information and knowledge: these are currencies that have never gone out of style.â
Tags:information,knowledge
A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point, after all.
He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive.
America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
Tags:religion,social_construct
There are stories that are true, in which each individualâs tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to othersâ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.
Tags:stories
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Tags:secrets
âThe TVâs the altar. Iâm what people are sacrificing to.â âWhat do they sacrifice?â asked Shadow. âTheir time, mostly,â said Lucy. âSometimes each other.â
Tags:perspective,present
Shadow shook his head. âYou know,â he said, âI think I would rather be a man than a god. We donât need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. Itâs what we do.â
Tags:persistence
He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped lifeâs vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.
Iâm 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 half an hourâs shut-eye. You follow me?â
Tags:basic_needs
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. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself.
I remember when it was all done in first draft telling Gene Wolfe, who is the wisest writer I know and has written more excellent novels than any man Iâve met, that I thought I had now learned how to write a novel. Gene looked at me, and smiled kindly. âYou never learn how to write a novel,â he told me. âYou only learn to write the novel youâre on.â
Tags:perspective,writing
âThere was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So donât knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you donât.â
If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing.
You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel?â âNever.â âBest thing a man can do. Itâs not the fish you catch, itâs the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.â
Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldnât feel anything at all.
Belief without blood only takes us so far. The blood must flow.â
But thereâs none so blindâow! Good one!âas those who will not listen.â
Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual.
Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.â
âToo much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.
âThere are a lot of good places,â said Whiskey Jack. âThatâs kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the landâs still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isnât going anywhere.
Itâs not the fish you catch, itâs the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.â
And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: donât piss off people who work in airports.