The best Quotes from The Neverending Story

The beginning is always dark.

Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can’t explain them, and those who haven’t known them have no understanding of them at all.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.

You wish for something, you've wanted it for years, and you're sure you want it, as long as you know you can't have it. But if all at once it looks as though your wish might come true, you suddenly find yourself wishing you had never wished for any such thing.

Once someone dreams a dream, it can't just drop out of existence. But if the dreamer can't remember it, what becomes of it? It lives on in Fantastica, deep under earth. There are forgotten dreams stored in many layers. The deeper one digs, the closer they are. All Fantastica rests on a foundation of forgotten dreams.

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger-

If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early-

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless-

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.

Every real story is a never ending story.

"You see, Momo," he told her one day, "it's like this: Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept."
He gazed silently into space before continuing.
"And then you start to hurry," he went on. "You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop - and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it."

He pondered a while. Then he said, "You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else."
Again he paused for thought before adding, "That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be."

But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.

Those who still think that listening isn't an art should see if they can do it half as well.

People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.

But time is life, and life exists in our hearts, and the more of it that the people saved, the less they actually had.

All the games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot to be happy, how to take pleasure in little things and last, but not least, how to dream.

In his opinion, all the world's misfortunes stemmed from the countless untruths, both deliberate and unintentional, which people told because of haste or carelessness.

Now, for the first time ever, a story had escaped his control. It had taken on a life of its own, and all the imagination in the world would be insufficient to halt it. He felt numb.

"What's so clever about working hard ?" he said to Momo. "Anyone can get rich quick that way, but who wants to look like the people who've sold themselves body and soul for money's sake?"

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.

"One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."

I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.

In the beginning of a jorney, no one knows what to expect. They might have a vague idea the road ahead could be rough. That's what makes new beginnings so exciting. You don't know what will happen until it's over.

I get that you're scared and that you've been hurt. But doing what is easy and safe is no way to live, and a life without passion and love is so far beneath what you deserve.

People aren't like numbers. They're more like letters. And those letters want to become stories. And dad said that stories need to be shared.

An ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.

Maybe shooting stars aren't really supposed to grant wishes, but to make us think about what we really want...

Sometimes in life when you get what you want, you end up missing what you left behind.

It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live.

If you only ever read one book in your life I highly recommend... keeping your f*cking mouth shut.

"Oh yes, time flies and before you know it you're old," said Pippi. "Come autumn I'll be ten, and I suppose I'll be past my prime then."

People say "nothing is impossible", but I do nothing every day.

The Rainbow Fish shared his scales left and right. And the more he gave away, the more delighted he became.

Once there was a boy. He was, let us say, something like fourteen years old; long and loose jointed and towheaded. He wasn't good for much, that boy. His chief delight was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief.

One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and - pop! - out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.

And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

Walk until the darkness is a memory, and you become the sun on the next traveler's horizon.