"Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying
to tell you somebody?"
– John Constantine, in Sandman #3: "Dream a Little Dream of Me"
"One thing I've learned. You can know anything. It's all there. You just
have to find it."
– John Constantine, in Sandman #3: "Dream a Little Dream of Me"
"I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it."
– Delirium, in Sandman "Season of Mists", episode 0
"I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go."
– Neil Gaiman, Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"If I hear another of your theological paradoxes, I'll scream. Frankly,
today I don't care if God exists or not."
"I doubt He feels likewise, Miss Walker."
– Rose Walker and Gilbert, in SANDMAN #14: "Collectors"
"Do you know what Freud said about dreams of flying? It means you're really
dreaming about having sex."
"Indeed? Tell me, then, what does it mean when you dream about having sex?"
– Rose Walker and Dream, in SANDMAN #15: "Into The Night"
"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They
don't teach you how to love someone. They don't teach you how to be famous.
They don't teach you how to be rich, or how to be poor. They don't teach you
how to walk away from someone you don't love longer. They don't teach you how
to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to
say to someone who's dying.
"They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
– in The Kindly Ones
"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go
away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmare's 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."
– John Constantine, "Hold Me"
"...everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All
of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring
they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent,
wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds.... Not just one world. Hundreds of them.
Thousands, maybe.
"Isn't that a weird thought?"
– Neil Gaiman, Sandman: A Game of You
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't
true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I
can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the
Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible,
that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels
and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkledy
lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I
believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe
that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass.
I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating
and that the decline of good sex in America is coincident with the decline in
drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians
are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the
alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when
the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators
and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance
to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold
like the Martians in War of The Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of
the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon
sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed
Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe
that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically
impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that
there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although
if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different
kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older
than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and
worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set
the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't
even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal
chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says
that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who
claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe
in absolute honesty and sensible social lies too. I believe in a woman's right
to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's
nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly,
and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that
life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when
you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
– Neil Gaiman, American Gods
"Change. Change. Change. Change ... change. Change. Chaaange. When you say
words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway,
and we just think they do."
– Neil Gaiman, Delirium in Sandman #41: "Brief Lives"
"What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that
you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked
a long time ago?"
"There isn't one."
"Oh. I thought maybe there was."
– Neil Gaiman, Delirium and Dream in Sandman #43: "Brief Lives"
"We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that,
however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend
together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was
in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things
alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old."
– Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Wake