THE DARKNESS
Quotes from the works of Neil Gaiman
There are seven beings that aren't gods, who existed before humanity dreamed of gods and will exist after the last god is dead. They are called The Endless.
Destiny, Death, Dream, Detruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. -The Sandman
In my opinion, he's one of the most quotable men alive. I've gotten more quotes from Sandman than any work, save Vasquezian things. They even have a book entitled The Quotable Sandman which is, I assume, quotes from The Sandman. But I don't own that book [sigh]. All these quotes were picked and written down by hand. Organized by the book I got them from. And these aren't all Sandman, Gaiman has done many more things that are equally quotable. For that matter there are a few from intros and such that aren't Gaiman, which are noted as such.
The Sandman: Season of Mists
1. You don't have to stay anywhere forever. -Edwin Paine, quoted in Sandman: Season of Mists
2. There is a dreadful Hell,
And everlasting pains;
There sinners must with devils dwell
In darkness, fire, and chains. -Isaac Watts, Divine and Moral Songs for Children 1720, quoted in Sandman: Season of Mists
3. Destiny holds his secrets.
4. Everything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless, as everything created has an end.
5. We are here because this is where we must be at this time, my dearie-dove. -The Fates
6. I think we've learned all we're going to at school. Now: Let's see what life's got to offer us... -Charles Rowland
7. You know, the idea of what someone like you considers a long time sends shivers down my spine. -Hob, to Dream
8. And already the wind is dying back, signaling the transition from nowhere to WHERE. Already the mists are parting. "Welcome to Hell," I tell myself. And I am afraid. Welcome to Hell. -Dream
9. I could never again be an angel...Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. -Lucifer
10. I think Hell's something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. -Charles Rowland
11. If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends. If you didn't, I trust you'll get throat cancer and die without ever again uttering another word. -Cain
12. I suggest that you leave this room at this time. It will cease to exist shortly. -Dream
The Sandman: Brief Lives
13. When you say words alot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do. -Delirium
14. It always rains on the unloved.
15. You've never apologized to me. You just act like you know stuff I don't know that makes everything you do okay. -Delirium
16. You lived what anybody gets...You got a lifetime. No more. No less. You got a lifetime. -Death
17. If you don't have a name, what do people call you? I mean, do they just wave and smile, or kingle little silver bells or what? -Delirium
18. I knew it was going to be the last place I looked for it, so I looked there first. -Delirium
19. I think you're very nice. I think twinkle's a nice word. So's viridian. I met a lady once who had an imaginary fish. -Delirium
20. Reason is a flawed tool at best, my brother. -Dream
21. Ruby's dead?...Ah me. That's the trouble with mortals. They do that. -Pharamond
22. Unripe mind apples tumble screaming through the sky, and the stars gasp in brief flashes of pain and time...
23. ...Only Death travels wheresoever she must, without misgiving.
24. Have you ever spent days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one's ever eaten before? Like chicken and telephone ice cream?...Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn't like that at all. -Delirium
25. Be to her Virtues very Kind.
Be to her faults a little Blind. -epitaph
26. Ah, yes. You must have grown on a particularly penetrating and incisive branch of the family tree. -Barnabas
27. I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in-betweens. -Delirium
28. ...everyone can know everything Destiny knows. And more than that...we not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable. -Death
29. A two-sided coin: Destruction is needed. Nothing new can exist without destroying the old. -Destruction
30. Dream, my brother. You forget NOTHING you have interest in; you forget, instantly, those things you do not care to know. -Destruction
31. Your life is your own. Your death, likewise. Always, and forever, your own. -Dream
32. You are mortal: it is the mortal way. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. So live. -Dream
33. You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it's just cold and wet and empty, but when you look out a plane it's a special world...and I like that. -Delirium
34. The Lapps believe that it is unwise in any way to attract the attention of the dancing northern lights, or they will carry you off into the sky, to be one with them forever. The Alderman is old enough to know how rarely this happens. Still and all, he is uneasy.
The Sandman: World's End
33. Pictures and word balloons don't mean dumb. -Stephen King, Introduction
34. We of faerie are of the wild magic. We are not creatures of spells and grimoires. We are spells and we are written of in grimoires. There are the glamours, that we all control, to some degree or another: we can stand in a crowd and never be noticed; we can make you love us till your heart gives out. All the mirror games we play...There are darker currents that run beneath the surface, like the wild wind storming across the heathland or the flash of lightning on a clear summer's night, and these are not predictable things. For example: sometimes we say true things. And these things we say are neither glamour nor magic, neither prediction nor curse: but sometimes what we say is true. And even if you're a tremendous liar, like myself, well, it's even true for me. -Cluracan
35. Names do not define us, but they influence us for good or ill, help to shape and form us. -Cluracan
36. At the end of the procession, a bit behind everyone else, there were these two girls. One of them kept hesitating. She'd walk a few steps and stop. Like she'd forgotten what she was doing, where she was. Then she'd walk a little more. The other one...the one at the end...I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'd still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And she looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life. -Brant Tucker, upon seeing Delirium and Death
The Sandman: The Kindly Ones
37. There's a moment of fear in the returning to sleep. A hesitation: There are darknesses beyond the curtain of waking, and the shadow-plays clutch at my heart...Too late. I'm gone.
38. -If anyone hurt him, if anything happened...
-Yeah, I know. If anything happened you'd just die.
-I wouldn't die Carla. If anyone hurt Daniel, I'd kill them.
-Lyta and Carla
39. A dark mirror. Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom slowly you perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from a black metal. You have been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still... That was always the intention... But the gulf between conception and execution is wide, and many things can happen on the way. -Dream
40. I remember once I dreamed that Peggy died. And I woke up in tears. Then I woke up a bit more, and it came to me that it was only a silly dream. And I rolled over in bed to tell Peg about it, but she wasn't there. And then I woke up properly, and I realized that she'd died a month before. Dreams are tricky buggers. You can't trust them. -Hob Gadling
41. I don't remember what you smelled like. You've been gone two days, and I don't remember how you smelled. You didn't smell like anyone else. I liked the way you smelled. I...I miss you a lot. -Hob Gadling
42. Storms are coming. -Dream
43.It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. -Dream
44. This place is an aspect of a part of me, Matthew. That is true. However, I am also, to some extent, an aspect of this place. That should not be forgotten. -Dream
45. Gods don't "like". They love, and they hate, and they ignore... -Stheno
46. Twos don't work. Twos hurt and crumble. Twos fall into ones, and then into dust and nothings. -Euryale
47. Can I have more water, please? My hair drank most of it. -Hippolyta
48. I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you in school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. 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 any 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. -Rose
49. -You are the second.
-What happened to the first?
-He was a disappointment. I uncreated him.
-Dream and The Corinthian
50. -They're just made up people. They don't really exist.
-That doesn't mean they don't have stories.
-The Old Ladies
51. I wish I'd done something like that as a kid. All the dreams you have. Looking for Piglet. It doesn't matter that you never find it. It's the dreams that keep you going. -Rose
52. -...only a fool listens to rumors.
-Only a fool ignores them.
, -Dream and Odin
53. -A woman shouldn't have to sleep her life away. Women aren't about dreaming. We're about the real world.
-Even your grandma woke before she died. Women are about waking, Rose.
-As mothers, we wake them from nothingness to existence.
-As maidens we wake them to the joys and miseries of adulthood, wake them to the worlds of lust and responsibility.
-And when their time's up, it's always us has to wash them for the last time, and we lay them out for the wake.
-The Three Women
54. I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you agreed to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options. -Barnabus
55. I see things as they are. How then can I bear a grudge? -Destiny
56. Nothing is harmless. Nothing is too cute and sweet to be dangerous. Nothing is safe. -Larissa
57. All journeys leave marks on us.
58. We do what we have to do. That's the most anyone can do.
59. ...All around me darkness gathers,
fading is the sun that shone,
We must speak of others matters:
You can be me when I'm gone...
60. There's but three Furies found in spacious Hell; but in a great man's breast three-thousand dwell.
61. ...even the freedom of the Dreaming can be a cage, of a kind...
62. And a hundred huge ravens flap their wings in your dreams and raise their black eyes to the storm, expectantly.
63. I think bad things have happened. I feel them in my socks. -Delirium
64. There isn't any innocent. There isn't any guilty. There's just dead. -Hal
65. Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on,
Still are withered by the evening:
You can be me when I'm gone.
66. Still, it's the heaviest of all these volumes and thus, in hardback at least, could be used to stun a burglar; which has always been my definition of real art. -Neil Gaiman
67. And on Fire's Day the Prince of Stories noted, without concern, but with a small amount of surprise, the arrival of a number of ravens in his realm. Some were larger than eagles. Some were older than gods. They stayed in the shadows, kawwing and tokking. Waiting.
68. I am honor bound to warn you to stay on the path through the castle. Straying from the path could mean your destruction...You killed my friend, woman. Stray from your path. -Wyvern
69. We are the kindly ones, Morpheus. We are the Erinyes. We are vengeance and hatred unending. We are your doom. -The Fates
70. It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up all this armor for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "Maybe we should just be friends" or "How very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart...It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love. -Rose Walker
71. Kill you? I wouldn't kill you...Why would I wish to incur the death-curse of a god? Even a pathetic, sneaking excuse for a god like you. But I can make you pray for death. -The Corinthian, to Loki
71. Customs have power, and only the truly brave, or the truly dangerous, will defy them. -Cluracan
72. Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare--a pumpkin with a gun. -Mervyn
The Sandman: The Wake
73. ...when you create characters and a storyscape that occupy somebody else's imagination, you lose the sole authority to determine how that work resounds in others' dreams. -Mikal Gilmore, Introduction
74. Heroes, remember, weren't always very nice folks. In fact, many of the classical ones-not to mention quite a few of the real-life historical ones-were vain, muderous, or otherwise interestingly fucked-up. The idea of the uncomplicated hero-like our current obsession with "moral" character-is a fairly modern-day work of misfortune. -Mikal Gilmore, Introduction
75. I would have thought that all one needs to understand people is to be a person. And I have that honor. -Will Shakespeare
76. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out a ten to see a dead indian. -Will Shakespeare
77. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt; but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now, I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of the Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own. -Will Shakespeare
78. I asked you earlier if you saw yourself reflected in your tale...I do not. I MAY not. I am Prince of Stories, Will; but I have no story of my own. Nor shall I ever. -Dream
79. It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best. -Destruction
80. -Why do people slow down to look at car crashes?
-Because they want to see if someone's dead, and they want to be sure it's not them. -Hob Gadling and Guenevere
81. "We are who we choose to be," sang the goldfinch, when the sun was high.
"I dream about dreams about dreams," sang the nightingale, under the pale moon.
82. Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while. That this is the way of life, from the All-Highest down to the meanest creature in creation...But whether this is the case or not, it is still a worthy thing to open cages. It is still a virtuous act to free the imprisoned. -Dream
83. Oneria (?) mutantur, nihil inherit. "Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost." -Dream
84. Only the phoenix arises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost. -Master Li
The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes
85. D is for lots of things. -John Dee
86. Dreams. Are they merely unconscious ruminations and remastications of the events of the day, colored by our psyches and the combined weight of experience that shapes us, or are they scenes from another realm that we tap into and actually help shape while we're asleep? -F. Paul Wilson, Introduction
87. Oh, you'll love these stories. That is, you will is you have the power to suspend disbelief, if you've retained that child-like (that's child-like, not childish) ability to climb on an author's back and let him fly you to realms where all the rules are off, where school is out-was never in, actually-and everything goes. -F. Paul Wilson, Introduction
88. Anybody can splatter you with blood and other sundry precious bodily fluids. But they wash off, don't they? Just like mud. Just like spilled food and drink. Wash right off your skin without leaving a trace of their passing. Not the good stuff, though. Good horror gets past the skin. It seeps through and insinuates its way into the tissues, invades the circulation, spreads to all the vital organs, contaminates the nervous system, taking up residence behind the eyes so that nothing looks quite the same again. Ever. -F. Paul Wilson, Introduction
89. -We wanted to capture Death.
-What? You wanted Death? Then count yourself lucky for the sake of your species and your petty planet that you did NOT succeed...You will never know how lucky you were.
-Alex Burgess and Dream
90. It was ter-terrifying! So real. Ha-have you ever had one of those dreams, you know...where you think you've woken up, but you haven't? It's just part of the nightmare and you're still in it... -Alex Burgess
91. -Now, WHY would I give you an exploding present? What kind of brother would I be if I did that?
-MY kind of brother.
-Cain and Abel
92. I would have dreamed of you...if I could dream. -John Dee
93. The dreams that pass through the gates of IVORY are LIES, FIGMENTS, and DECEPTIONS. The OTHER admits the TRUTH. NO ONE guards the horned gate anymore. I remember the way of OLD. -Dream
94. Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you SOMEBODY? -John Constantine
95. One thing I've learned. You can know anything. It's all there, you just have to find it. -John Constantine
96. I've been out of my depth before. Something tells me there are sharks in these depths. -John Constantine
97. It is NEVER 'only a dream'. -Dream
98. There's one at the door, at the gate to damnation,
Is it thief, thug, or whore? There's one at the door...
And there's room for one more till the end of creation.
There's one at the door. At the gate to damnation. -Squatterbloat
99. To rise among the fallen? Strange and true. -Etrigan
100. Things change...In Earth AND Hell. -Etrigan
101. Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does...Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent. -Dream
102. It has been a thousand years, Nada. ...Yes, I still love you. But I have not yet forgiven you. -Dream
103. Listen. You can hear the screaming. Listen: You can hear the sobbing...Listen to the anguish of a world in which the bad things are coming out of the dark places. Listen to a world in pain. Listen. You can hear it.
104. -Hey kids, Dino the dinosaur is trying to tell me something. Gee, Dino! I didn't know it was Terry Pteranodon's birthday today. Should we bake him a cake? And you want to tell me something else, do you Dino? ...We're going to die. Dino says we're going to die. Dino told me. He says we should slash our wrists now...and remember to slash down the wrist, boys and girls, not across the wrist...
-*Please stand by. We are experiencing technical difficulties.*
-Dino's Kid-Vid Playhouse
105. I think I'll dismember the world and then I'll dance in the wreckage. -John Dee
106. If you would steal a dreamlord's power...then you shall do it in the dreamlord's realm. In DREAMS. -Dream
107. I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the minds of the evil and the WICKED. Or just anybody I don't like. -John Dee
108. I'm the King of Dreams. Of everything. But it's funny. I always thought when I became king...I thought there would be applause. I thought somebody would say something. -John Dee
109. It is a comfort in wretchedness to have companions in woe. -Marlowe, Faust, quoted in The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes
110. It's never quiet here, not even at night. There's always someone crying, someone calling out, someone in the next cell banging their head against the wall. Banging and banging and banging. -Johnathan Crane
111. You see, until then I'd been driven. I'd had a true quest, a purpose beyond my function -- and then, suddenly, the quest was over. I felt...drained. Disappointed. Let down. Does that make sense? I had been sure that as soon as I had everything back I'd feel good. But inside I felt worse than when I started. I feel like...nothing. -Dream
112. Soundless, we travel. No heads turn to mark our passing. The churning crowd parts as we walk through it, looking everywhere else, but not at us. In the world of the waking, of the living, we move silent as a breath of cold wind. As we pass them, people shiver and look away, mutter to each other. "Feels like someone walking over my grave," I heard one man say. "Like someone just walked over my grave." -Dream
113. -Yes, I know who you are, Harry. Do you know who I am?
-You? You're...NO! NOT YET!...Please? Yeah, I know who you are.
-Death and Harry
114. -So. I'm dead. Now what?
-Now's when you find out, Harry.
-Harry and Death
115. She draws him close. From the darkness I hear the beating of mighty wings... -Dream
116. I'm sorry, Esme. Your time was up. Come here, honey. -Death
117. -Gets me down, too. Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the Sunless Lands. But they enter YOUR realm each night without fear.
-And I am far more terrible than you, my sister.
-Death and Dream
118. I find myself wondering about humanity. Their attitude to my sister's gift is so strange. Why do they fear the Sunless Lands? It is as natural to die as it is to be born. But they fear her. Dread her. Feebly they attempt to placate her. They do not love her. Many thousands of years ago I heard a song in a dream, a mortal song that celebrated her gift. I still remember it.
"Death is before me today:
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a
garden after sickness."
"Death is before me today:
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail
in a good wind."
"Death is before me today: Like the course of a stream,
Like the return of a man
from the war-galley to
his house."
"Death is before me today
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive."
That forgotten poet understood her gifts. My sister has a function to perform, even as I do. The Endless have their responsibilities. I walk by her side, and the darkness lifts from my soul. I walk with her, and I hear the gentle beating of mighty wings... -Dream
119. ...black [it's a sensible colour. It goes with anything. Well, anything black] -Neil Gaiman, Closing Notes
120. Rereading these stories today, I must confess I find many of them awkward and ungainly, although even the clusiest of them has something-a phrase perhaps, or an idea, or an image I'm still proud of. But they're where the story starts, and the seeds of much that has come after-and much that is still to come-were sown in the tales of this book.
Preludes and Nocturnes; a little night music from me to you.
I hope you liked them. Good night.
Pleasant dreams. -Neil Gaiman, June, 1991, Closing Notes
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