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For Some, It Was Easier To Take The Leap From The Leafless Tree And Dance On Nothing Until Dancing Was Done.
-Neil Gaiman
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For Some, It Was

Neil Gaiman
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For Some, It Was Easier To Take The Leap From The Leafless Tree And Dance On Nothing Until Dancing Was Done.

Understanding the Quote: "for some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless..."

This quote by Neil Gaiman reflects deeply on the theme of dancing. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Dancing, Tree, Done, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Neil Gaiman interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is celebrated for insightful thoughts on dancing and tree. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Dancing
Tree
Done
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Numbers
Fiction Takes Us To Places That We Would Never Otherwise Go, And Puts Us Behind Eyes That Are Not Our Own.
Eye
Fiction
Behinds
Going To Comic-con For Me Is Always Hard And Weird, So It Just Makes Me Feel Guilty. There's Always A Hundre Thousand People Out There Who Have Copies Of Things That I've Written And They Really Want Signed And They're Not Going To Get Them Signed.
People
Want
Guilty
I'm Somebody Who Considers Happiness A Journey, Not A Destination.
Journey
Destination
I Do Not Threaten, I Merely Advise Caution.
Caution
Advise
Entropy And Optimism: The Twin Forces That Make The World Go Around.
Optimism
World
Twins
Every Now And Then I'll Do Little Things, A Short Story Or Something, That Doesn't Have Any Fantastical Elements, But Mostly I Like The Power Of Playing God And I Like To Imagine Things.
Stories
Elements
Littles
What I Say Is, A Town Isn't A Town Without A Bookstore. It May Call Itself A Town, But Unless It's Got A Bookstore It Knows It's Not Fooling A Soul.
Book
Soul
May
The Simplest Way To Make Sure That We Raise Literate Children Is To Teach Them To Read, And To Show Them That Reading Is A Pleasurable Activity.
Children
Reading
Way
There Are Characters In Some Short Stories Who Exist As People, And There Are Other Characters In Different Short Stories Who Exist As Purely Literary Constructs. You Know, The Young Man In "forbidden Brides Of The Faceless Slaves In The Secret House Of The Night Of Dread Desire" - I Probably Got That Right - Is A Literary Construct, And Enjoys Being A Literary Construct. He Has No Life Off Stage, Whereas The Young Men In "how To Talk To Girls At Parties" Were As Near To Being Real Human Beings As I Could Possibly Get Them.
Girl
Real
Party
I Know Not Whether You Came To Me Or I To You. Not Whether It Was A Dream, Asleep Or Awake. I Am Lost In The Darkness Of A Downcast Heart. Dream Or Reality. Let It Be Decided Tonight.
Dream
Heart
Reality
Sister Mary Chose That Moment To Come In With The Tea. Satanist Or Not, She'd Also Found A Plate And Arranged Some Iced Biscuits On It.
Tea
Biscuits
Moments
Suppose We Pick A Name For Him, Eh?" Caius Pompeius Stepped Over And Eyed The Child. "he Looks A Little Like My Proconsul, Marcus. We Could Call Him Marcus." Josiah Worthington Said, "he Looks More Like My Head Gardener, Stebbins. Not That I'm Suggesting Stebbins As A Name. The Man Drank Like A Fish." "he Looks Like My Nephew Harry," Said Mother Slaughter... "he Looks Like Nobody But Himself," Said Mrs.owens, Firmly. "he Looks Like Nobody." "then Nobody It Is," Said Silas. "nobody Owens.
Mother
Children
Men
Peas Baffled Me. I Could Not Understand Why Grown-ups Would Take Things That Tasted So Good Raw, And Then Put Them In Tins, And Make Them Revolting.
Tin
Baffled
Peas
I Have A Feeling,’ He Said, ‘i Have A Feeling That We Were Meant To Be Together. That We Have Fought The Good Fight, Side By Side, In The Past Or In The Future, I Do Not Know. I Am A Rational Man, But I Have Learned The Value Of A Good Companion, And From The Moment I Clapped Eyes On You, I Knew I Trusted You As Well As I Do Myself. Yes, I Want You With Me.
Eye
Fighting
Past
But I Have Always Thought That These Tulips Must Have Had Names. They Were Red, And Orange And Red, And Red And Orange And Yellow, Like The Ember In A Nursery Fire Of A Winter's Evening. I Remember Them.
Winter
Names
Yellow
I Think I Would Rather Be A Man Than A God. We Don’t Need Anyone To Believe In Us. We Just Keep Going Anyhow. It’s What We Do.
Believe
Men
Thinking
Read The Books You Love, Tell People About Authors You Like, And Don’t Worry About It.
Book
People
Worry
He Sighed. It Was A Long Sigh, Weary And Worldly-wise. The Kind Of Sigh You Could Picture God Heaving After Six Days Of Hard Work And Looking Forward To Some Serious Cosmic R&r, Only To Be Handed A Report By An Angel Concerning A Problem With Someone Eating An Apple.
Wise
Hard Work
Angel
'doctor Who' Was The First Mythology That I Learned, Before Ever I Ran Into Greek Or Roman Or Egyptian Mythologies.
Doctors
Greek
Firsts
The Tongue Is The Most Remarkable. For We Use It Both To Taste Out Sweet Wine And Bitter Poison, Thus Also Do We Utter Words Both Sweet And Sout With The Same Tongue.
Sweet
Wine
Poison
Goodnight World. While I Sleep, I Hope You'll All Continue To Do Whatever It Is You Do. Unless You Murder Sleeping Authors. Don't Do That.
Sleep
World
Murder
The Future Came And Went In The Mildly Discouraging Way That Futures Do.
Time
Way
Discouraging
Somebody Said That Writers Are Like Otters... Otters, If They Do A Trick And You Give Them A Fish, The Next Time They'll Do A Better Trick Or A Different Trick Because They'd Already Done That One. And Writers Tend To Be Otters. Most Of Us Get Pretty Bored Doing The Same Trick. We've Done It, So Let's Do Something Different.
Writing
Otters
Giving
Pain Shared, My Brother, Is Pain Not Doubled But Halved. No Man Is An Island
Brother
Pain
Men
I Hope That In This Year To Come, You Make Mistakes. Because If You Are Making Mistakes...you're Doing Something.
New Year
Mistake
Years
When We Hold Each Other, In The Darkness, It Doesn't Make The Darkness Go Away. The Bad Things Are Still Out There. The Nightmares Still Walking. When We Hold Each Other We Feel Not Safe, But Better. "it's All Right" We Whisper, "i'm Here, I Love You." And We Lie: "i'll Never Leave You." For Just A Moment Or Two The Darkness Doesn't Seem So Bad.
Love
Lying
Two
Give Me Boredom. At Least I Know Where I'm Going To Eat And Sleep Tonight.
Sleep
Giving
Boredom
Walk Any Path In Destiny's Garden, And You Will Be Forced To Choose, Not Once But Many Times.
Destiny
Garden
Path
Stories Are Made Up By People Who Make Them Up. If They Work, They Get Retold. There's The Magic Of It.
People
Magic
Stories
You Must Have A Bladder Like Lake Erie. I Think Empires Rose And Fell In The Time It Took You To Pee. I Could Hear It The Whole Time." Thank You. Do You Want Something?
Thinking
Lakes
Want Something
"some Things May Change," Said Wednesday, Abruptly. "people, However... People Stay The Same."
People
May
Said
I Am Amiable. Vague. Puzzled. Messy-haired.
Messy
Amiable
Vague
Most People Can Start A Short Story Or A Novel. If You're A Writer, You Can Finish Them. Finish Enough Of Them, And You May Be Good Enough To Be Publishable.
People
Stories
May
I’m An Author. We Don’t Want To Lead. We Don’t Need To Follow. We Stay Home And Make Stuff Up And Write It Down And Send It Out Into The World, And Get Inside People’s Heads. Perhaps We Change The World And Perhaps We Don’t. We Never Know. We Just Make Stuff Up.
Home
Writing
People
Be Boring, Knowing Everything. You Have To Give All That Stuff Up If You're Going To Muck About Here.
Knowing Everything
Giving
Stuff
But Surely "argh" Is The Sound Of A Sort Of Strangulated Scream. "aargh" Is The Sound Of A Stabbing, Or A Falling Off A Cliff. "arr" Is, I Think, The Noise You're Looking For. It's The Noise Pirates Make When They Don't Have Anything Better To Do. "arr, Jim Lad" = Pirate Noise. "aargh, Jim Lad" = Sound Of Pirate Falling Off A Cliff.
Fall
Thinking
Pirate
I've Been Inspired By Dreams - I've Even Stolen Scenes Or Images Or Characters From Them.
Dream
Character
Inspired
Name The Different Kinds Of People,’ Said Miss Lupescu. ‘now.’ Bod Thought For A Moment. ‘the Living,’ He Said. ‘er. The Dead.’ He Stopped. Then, ‘... Cats?’ He Offered, Uncertainly.
Cat
Names
People
I Wish Being A Beekeeper, Which I Am, Gave You A Free Pass On The Carbon Footprint, But It Doesn't.
Carbon Footprint
Wish
Footprint
If I Come Back, It Will Be A Place, But It Won't Be A Home Any Longer.
Home
Ifs
Coraline Shivered. She Preferred Her Other Mother To Have A Location: If She Were Nowhere, Then She Could Be Anywhere. And, After All, It Is Always Easier To Be Afraid Of Something You Cannot See.
Mother
Fear
Location
When I Was Young, You Know, The First Foreign Editions That Would Come In Of Anything Of Mine, I'd Sit There And Look At Them As These Strange And Wonderful Artifacts.
Looks
Firsts
Strange
Right," Said Fat Charlie Conversationally. "you Realize, Of Course, That This Means War." It Was The Traditional War Cry Of A Rabbit When Pushed Too Far.
War
Mean
Rabbits
Honestly, If You're Given The Choice Between Armageddon Or Tea, You Don't Say "what Kind Of Tea?"
Choices
Tea
Kind
The Problems With Success, Frankly, Are Infinitely Preferable To The Problems Of Failure.
Problem
He Was Painfully Shy, Which, As Is Often The Manner Of The Painfully Shy, He Overcompensated For By Being Too Loud At The Wrong Times.
Shy
Loud
Wrong Time
I Was A Book-y Child. I Was Much More Book-y Than Dark.
Children
Book
Dark
The Best Way To Show People True Things Is From A Direction That They Had Not Imagined The Truth Coming.
People
Way
Shows
I Am Selfish, Private And Easily Bored. Will This Be A Problem?
Selfish
Bored
Problem
Writing Fiction Is Not A Profession That Leaves One Well-disposed Toward Reading Fiction. One Starts Out Loving Books And Stories, And Then One Becomes Jaded And Increasingly Hard To Please. I Read Less And Less Fiction These Days, Finding The Buzz And The Joy I Used To Get From Fiction In Ever Stranger Works Of Non-fiction, Or Poetry.
Book
Reading
Writing
There's A Glorious Sense Of Freedom In Comedy, Just Allowing Myself To Tell Jokes, Allowing Myself To Interrupt Myself And Tell Old African Folk Stories That I Made Up - Or Didn't - And Jamaican Stories.
Stories
Literature
Comedy
The One Thing That You Have That Nobody Else Has Is You. Your Voice, Your Mind, Your Story, Your Vision. So Write And Draw And Build And Play And Dance And Live As Only You Can.
Inspirational
Dance
Love Yourself
Have You Ever Been In Love? Horrible Isn't It? It Makes You So Vulnerable. It Opens Your Chest And It Opens Up Your Heart And It Means That Someone Can Get Inside You And Mess You Up.
Love
Broken Heart
Heartbreak
Never Mind. There. For Good Or Bad. It's Done.
Mind
Done
The Young Man Shivered. He Rolled The Stock Themes Of Fantasy Over In His Mind: Cars And Stockbrokers And Commuters, Housewives And Police, Agony Columns And Commercials For Soap, Income Tax And Cheap Restaurants, Magazines And Credit Cards And Streetlights And Computers... 'it Is Escapism, True,' He Said, Aloud. 'but Is Not The Highest Impulse In Mankind The Urge Toward Freedom, The Drive To Escape?
Men
Agony
Car
It Doesn't Matter That You Didn't Believe In Us," Said Mr. Ibis. "we Believed In You.
Believe
Matter
Said
It Is Neither Fair Nor Unfair, Nobody Owens. It Simply Is
Unfair
Fairs
If You Read Enough Lionel Fanthorpe, Your Brain Starts To Turn To Jelly And Just Dribbles Out Of Your Ears.
Brain
Jelly
Ears
You Don't Get Heaven Or Hell. Do You Know The Only Reward You Get For Being Batman? You Get To Be Batman.
Heaven
Rewards
Hell
Sometimes Life Is Hard. Things Go Wrong—in Life And In Love And In Business And In Friendship And In Health And In All The Other Ways That Life Can Go Wrong. And When Things Get Tough, This Is What You Should Do: Make Good Art. . . . Someone On The Internet Thinks What You’re Doing Is Stupid Or Evil Or It’s All Been Done Before: Make Good Art. Probably Things Will Work Out Somehow, Eventually Time Will Take The Sting Away, And It Doesn’t Even Matter. Do What Only You Can Do Best: Make Good Art.
Art
Stupid
Thinking
But How Can You Walk Away From Something And Still Come Back To It?" "easy," Said The Cat. "think Of Somebody Walking Around The World. You Start Out Walking Away From Something And End Up Coming Back To It." "small World," Said Coraline. "it's Big Enough For Her," Said The Cat. "spiders' Webs Only Have To Be Large Enough To Catch Flies." Coraline Shivered.
Cat
Thinking
Walking Away
People Take On The Shapes Of The Songs And The Stories That Surround Them, Especially If They Don't Have Their Own Song.
Song
People
Stories
Shadow Looked Down At The Girl On The Table. “what Happened To Her?” He Asked. “poor Taste In Boyfriends,” Said Jacquel. “it’s Not Always Fatal.
Girl
Shadow
Tables
Words Can Be Worrisome, Poeple Complex, Motives And Manners Unclear, Grant Her The Wisdom To Choose Her Path Right, Free From Unkindness And Fear.
Path
Manners
Motive
I Suspect There Are Two Kinds Of Novelists. Those Who Have A Point Of View And Have Something To Say And Then Write A Novel In Order To Say That Thing, And Those Of Us Who Write The Book In Order To Find Out What We Think About That Thing.
Book
Writing
Thinking
I Always Wanted To Be A Writer, But Alan Moore's Work And Help Inspired Me To Write Comics. In Some Ways The Biggest Influence On Me Writing Was Punk. There Was The Idea That You Could Do Something By Simply Doing It.
Writing
Ideas
Way
If You Do Not Value Libraries Then You Do Not Value Information Or Culture Or Wisdom. You Are Silencing The Voices Of The Past And You Are Damaging The Future.
Past
Voice
Library
All Cats Can See Futures, And See Echoes Of The Past. We Can Watch The Passage Of Creatures From The Infinity Of Now, From All The Worlds Like Ours, Only Fractionally Different. And We Follow Them With Our Eyes, Ghost Things, And The Humans See Nothing.
Cat
Eye
Past
In Comics, Collaboration Saves Your Life. How Well You Can Work With An Artist, A Colorist, A Letterer, Is How Good Your Comic Is.
Artist
Collaboration
Comic
Words Save Our Lives, Sometimes.
Sometimes
Our Lives
There Are Only Two Worlds - Your World, Which Is The Real World, And Other Worlds, The Fantasy. Worlds Like This Are Worlds Of The Human Imagination: Their Reality, Or Lack Of Reality, Is Not Important. What Is Important Is That They Are There. These Worlds Provide An Alternative. Provide An Escape. Provide A Threat. Provide A Dream, And Power; Provide Refuge, And Pain. They Give Your World Meaning. They Do Not Exist; And Thus They Are All That Matters.
Dream
Pain
Real
Classic Authors Should Be Older Than I Am, And Wiser, And On-top Of All Their Deadlines.
Classic
Should
Deadline
You Think You're Being Given All Of These Things: Phones That Can Communicate With Other Devices, Car Service That's Better Than A Taxi, All Of These Amazing Things That Are Available To You At Any Time. It Isn't Until You've Swum Across The River That You Can Start To See The Negative Aspects Of It All.
Thinking
Car
Negative
I Always Figure There Are Novels And Short Stories, And In Those, I'm God. No One Tells Me What To Do. I Don't Have To Lose A Page, Or Cut Anything, It's Just Mine. Then There Are Other Things Where You're Up Against Realities.
Cutting
Reality
Novel
Whenever It Rains You Will Think Of Her.
Rain
Rainy Day
Thinking
After A While It Sort Of Began To Rain, Which Is To Say That It Was The Kind Of Rain That Never Comes To A Decision About Whether It's Actually Raining Or Not. Driving In It, You Would Never Have Been Certain Whether Or Not To Turn On Your Wipers.
Rain
Decision
Driving
All Writers Have This Vague Hope That The Elves Will Come In The Night And Finish Any Stories.
Writing
Night
Stories
Notoriety Wasn't As Good As Fame, But Was Heaps Better Than Obscurity.
Obscurity
Fame
Notoriety
Until That Moment She Had Never Thought She Could Do It. Never Thought She Would Be Brave Enough Or Scared Enough, Or Desperate Enough To Dare.
Brave
Would Be
Scared
You Can Buy A Book New, Buy It In Hardback Or Wait For The Paperback, Find It Used Or As A Collectible. I Don't Mind. What I Care About Most Is That People Are Reading.
Book
Reading
People
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