Neil Gaiman Quotes

How can the life of such a man be in the palm of some fools hand?

Control is an illusion.

I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.

We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.

The jellyfish doesn't actively move anywhere - it's just moved with the tides. Is that what man is? Man's just the jellyfish: stuff happens to you, and you get twisted in different directions.

We like to believe we are in control of our destinies, even though we never are and we never have been.

We don't have control over many things. We're always grasping for it, but in reality, we don't have a lot of control.

You realize there are things you can't control. You can't control a lot of the stuff that happens in your life.

You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control -Mia

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkly down the torrent of his fate.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

It's an illusion, control," Naomi said. "You ought to understand that by now, young Claire. We are never in control of our destinies, even the strongest of us. All we can hope to do is not be too badly damaged by events.

We are never really in control. We just think we are when things happen to be going our way.

Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as an life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly.

And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning -- and, once decided, best unseen.

You can't take responsibility for everything. You can't have that kind of control. At some point, it's all out of our hands.

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

Man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert nor hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.

I have no will, unless it be the will never to decide. I have been so overwhelmed by the many storms that have broken over my head, that I am become passive in the hands of the Almighty, like a sparrow in the talons of an eagle. I live, because it is not ordained for me to die.

Fortunately, we are not in control.

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.