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There 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 don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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It's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea."

"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow.

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves 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.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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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. "They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us," said Odin. "You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise."

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune teller.

“Now,” said Wednesday, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns.”

He dropped a coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.

Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up and put it in his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,” said Shadow.

“A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”

Shadow put his own coin into the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it.

EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING.

YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE.

YOUR LUCKY COLOUR IS DEAD.

Motto:

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.

Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it inside his pocket.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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"This is the only country in the world," said Wednesday, into the stillness, "that worries about what it is."

"What?"

"The 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."

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

American Gods

Séries Fantásticas

A Comic Con de San Diego is on e parece que vamos ter muitas novidades ao longo destes três dias! Vão ser muitas notícias e trailers nos próximos dias, mas eu vou apenas falar daquilo que mais me interessa. American Gods foi um dos melhores livros que li nos últimos tempos, como tal fiquei bastante entusiasmada quando saíram as notícias de que seria feita uma adaptação para televisão. Nos últimos meses têm saído várias notícias sobre quais são os actores que vão interpretar a panóplia de personagens que fazem parte da história criada por Neil Gaiman. E agora temos finalmente um trailer para ficarmos com uma ideia de como vai ser a adaptação televisiva do livro.

A série foi criada poe Bryan Fuller e Michael Green para o canal Starz. Fuller e Green ecreveram o argumento para o primeiro episódio e serão os showrunners da série, enquanto Neil Gaiman será o produtor executivo da série juntamente com Fuller, Green, Craig Cegielski, Stefanie Berk e Thom Beers. Parece que estão a pensar fazer mais do que uma temporada sobre a história, sendo que a segunda se vai focar na parte em que Shadow se encontra em Lakeside e ainda há a possibilidade de fazerem uma terceira para a conclusão épica da história. Assim já parece que estão a esticar demasiado a corda em relação ao que esxiste para contar, mas soponho que a decisão estará dependente das audiências da série.

A série segue a história do misterioso Shadow, um homem que é posto em liberdade uns dias mais cedo do que estava previsto, depois de ter cumprido uma pena de três anos por um assalto a um banco, pois a sua amada esposa Laura é morta num acidente de carro. A caminho do funeral, Shadow conhece um homem que se apresenta como Mr. Wednesday, que parece saber mais sobre a vida de Shadow, tanto do passado como do presente, do que seria esperado. Shadow acaba por descobrir que Wednesday é na verdade Odin, o deus da mitologia nórdica e que todos os deuses em que a humanidade alguma vez acreditou estão vivos na forma humana e vivem entre as pessoas normais. Shadow acaba por se ver ainda envolvido num conflito entre os deuses Antigos e os designados "Novos Deuses", os deuses do dinheiro e da tecnologia que acreditam que já não há lugar na terra para os deuses Antigos. No elenco de American Gods estão Ricky Whittle (Shadow Moon), Ian McShane (Mr. Wednesday), Emily Browning (Laura Moon), Pablo Schreiber (Mad Sweeney), Yetide Badaki (Bilquis), Bruce Langley (Technical Boy), Jonathan Tucker (Low Key Lyesmith), Crispin Glover (Mr. World), Cloris Leachman (Zorya Vechernyaya), Peter Stormare (Czernobog), Chris Obi (Mr. Jacquel), Mousa Kraish (the Jinn), Gillian Anderson (Media), Omid Abtahi (Salim), Orlando Jones (Mr. Nancy), Demore Barnes (Mr. Ibis), Dane Cook (Robbie), Kristin Chenoweth (Easter).

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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. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. 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. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

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Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes.

I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life. I want to bereally alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me - hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know."

She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands.

"Look, 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."

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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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 wouldn't feel anything at all.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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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.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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"Fuck you," said Czernobog. "Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart."

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. 

And the reply was, Eat the strawberries.

The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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Gods die. 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.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

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. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman