Neil Gaiman Quotes

Pay attention to other people's nightmares because they might be contagious.

A scary movie puts a lot of people, a mob, in one place. There are advantages to that because the panic runs through the audience. If it's a good movie, the fear jumps from one person to the next. You can find yourself screaming just because everybody around you is screaming. There's a real atmosphere of terror. It's also visual, which means that you can't look away from this thing - it's happening. You're in the dark. It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream. It's very, very visual. It works on all those levels.

If there is any form of contagion that is adaptive, it is the immediate response to the fear of others. If others are fearful, there may be good reason for you to be fearful too.

If you are angry you will share anger, if you are greedy you will share greed, if you are full of lust you will share your lust. We can share only that which we have, we cannot share that which we don't have. This has to be the fundamental thing to be remembered; hence the first step is meditation and the second step is compassion.

If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Energy is contagious: either you affect people or you infect people.

Everything you do right now ripples outward and affects everyone. Your posture can shine your heart or transmit anxiety. Your breath can radiate love or muddy the room in depression. Your glance can awaken joy. Your words can inspire freedom. Your every act can open hearts and minds.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

Since an attitude is often expressed by our body language and by the looks on our faces, it can be contagious.

Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.

Children internalize their parents' unhappiness. Fortunately, they absorb our contentment just as readily.

When people are fanatical about something, it's contagious.

A leader's attitude is caught by his or her followers more quickly than his or her actions.

Your thoughts and actions not only influence your mood, but the moods of all you cross paths with. Thinking lovingly. Do lovingly. Be a messenger for love.

If you're trying to make someone happy, you gotta try and make them happy. If you're trying to have a normal conversation, you've got to have a normal conversation. If you're trying to make them sad, you've got to make them sad. I think that's how you get real performances out of people.

But everybody is afraid of death; that too is contagious. Your parents are afraid of death, your neighbors are afraid of death. Small children start getting infected by this constant fear all around. Everybody is afraid of death. People don't even want to talk about death.

Emotion is contagious.

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state.

Never worry alone. When anxiety grabs my mind, it is self-perpetuating. Worrisome thoughts reproduce faster than rabbits, so one of the most powerful ways to stop the spiral of worry is simply to disclose my worry to a friend... The simple act of reassurance from another human being [becomes] a tool of the Spirit to cast out fear -- because peace and fear are both contagious.

Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.

The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.

If you feel depressed you shouldn't go out on the street because it will show on your face and you'll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.

If you're hanging out with two negative people, do they equal one positive person?