How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. (13.26)
What a concept. First of all, it almost ruins birthday cake for us (don't worry, we said almost), but what if everything we knew was just a thin veneer of illusion designed to protect us from the dirty reality of the world? Now if you don't mind, we're feeling a little hungry…
Quote #8
Where it devoured the grass, nothing remained—a perfect nothing, only a color that reminded me of gray, but a formless, pulsing gray like the shifting static of our television screen when you dislodged the aerial cord and the picture had gone completely. This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality. (14.38)
So beneath the layer of our reality is complete and utter nothingness and a "dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger"? Make up your mind, Gaiman.
Quote #9
The voice that was like Old Mrs. Hempstock's said, "Shall I bind you creatures in the heart of a dark star, to feel your pain in a place where every fragment of a moment lasts a thousand years? Shall I invoke the compacts of Creation, and have you all removed from the list of created things, so there never will have been any hunger birds, and anything that wishes to traipse from world to world can do it with impunity?" (14.88)
Talk about changing reality as we know it. Gran is capable of removing the entirety of the hunger birds' existence—and the prospective new reality would be even scarier. Side note: where can we get our hands on that list? Proof of unicorns would be awesome.