"Father? I am your son. That is only a kitten. Why do you abandon me to chase after it?"
"When you were alive, you were all my joy. Now you are dead. I see you only in my dreams. And when I awake my pillow is wet with tears. The kitten is living, and it needs my help."
Reality shifts in the Soft Places, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
Why are you here, in this home of demons? Are you lost? Or are you also a demon? Forgive my bluntness, but I am an old man, and my flesh is sure to be stringy and lacking in taste: I doubt even a demon would relish it.
Master Li is frightened of Dream, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
I have no liking for prisons, Master Li. Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.
Dream, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
"Lord -- what was it the barbarian said, as the riders vanished?"
"'Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.' 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.' Fare you well, Master Li."
Master Li and Dream, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
But truth or no, still I believe in the correct manner, and correctness in behaviour is one of the cardinal virtues. I place the kitten in my sleeve once more. I have saved his life, as he saved mine, and am responsible for him. We cannot evade our responsibilities.
Master Li, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
I am banished to the grey waste at the end of the world, but I mourn myself no longer; I cherish the pain in my hand. I imagine the taste of the mulberries in the violet dusk. And tomorrow I shall arrive in the town of Wei.
Master Li, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
Only the phoenix arises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.
The true end of the series, in SANDMAN #74, "The Exile"
"Where does this one come from? Have you been raiding poor Holinshed again? Or does Plutarch bear the brunt of your depredations?"
"Bits of things, here and there, but it's mostly mine, for once."
Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, in SANDMAN #75, "The Tempest"
Well, my own fine words notwithstanding, life is no play. We meet people once, and never see them again. There is no shape to events, no point at which we turn to the audience for their praise. No time at which we step behind the stage, to see the actors changing their wigs, and painting their faces, and muttering their lines.
William Shakespeare, in SANDMAN #75, "The Tempest"
"Nothing to fear? I thought I heard the beating of mighty wings, as in a nightmare that rode me when I was a boy..."
"You do. But have no fear of them."
Shakespeare and Dream, in SANDMAN #75, "The Tempest"
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 relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss.
William Shakespeare, in SANDMAN #75, "The Tempest"
"All we know for sure is that we don't know anything for sure."
"That is a particularly foolish thing to say, John Constantine. Light and darkness, life and death. These things are eternally certain."
John Constantine and Dr Occult, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.
Dr Occult, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
"Wow. That's wicked! Like Star Wars."
"A strange analogy, child, but indeed, there was a war in heaven, and you see the vanquished now, burning as they fall, like stars. In the darkness before the first dawn, theirs was the first folly; theirs the first rebellion."
Tim and Dr Occult, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
The true Atlantis is inside you, just as it's inside all of us. The sunken land is lost beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds. Atlantis is the shadow-land, the birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the west that is lost to us, but remains forever, true birthplace and true goal.
The Atlantean sorceror, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
It's all going to be a dreadful mess. I mean, I'll get Arthur up and running, swords out of stones, all that. Create the fleeting wisp of glory called Camelot, like a firework, a Roman candle, that sputters its light through the dark ages and then fades from sight once more. If I saw it through I'd make it work, you see. It'd all work just fine. But I won't.
Merlin, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.
Dr Occult, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
My life is strobed like lightning by a follow-spot, and looking backwards I can only see the corpses of the animals and birds who strutted with me on the darkened stage and helped me fool them all.
Zatara, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
I wrote my name, but I can find it no longer; my ashes blow like dust around the invisible labyrinth.
Zatara, in BOOKS OF MAGIC #1
"Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by the finished film?"
"Not... really. Probably because I know how far they are from what I had in my head. That's where the real films are. Then I put them on paper and finally I have to shoot them... put them out of their misery."
A questioner and the film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
"That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger." That's as maybe. But that which does kill us kills us, and ain't that a bitch...
The dying film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
How do you make sense of your life? Signal to noise: What's signal? What's noise?
The dying film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
Perhaps they are leaving the village. They are going up to the high place, to wait there for the end of their world. And here in my room (I will be fifty soon. I wonder if I will see that birthday, if I will be here to celebrate?)... all alone, I am going with them.
The director's last screenplay in SIGNAL TO NOISE
I assume he was an actor. In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
When I was a child I used to draw people as animals - elephants, giraffes, mice. Was I retreating into childhood? I kept thinking of my doctor as a big cat. A snow leopard. A beautiful predator.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
The walls of my study are covered with faces. Film faces. Actors. Directors. Extras. Old faces I've bought in film and junk shops on three continents. A patchwork of the nameless and the ones that interested me, with, here and there, a sprinkling of stars.
They are my frame of reference, the world in which I move. I can stare at them for hours, wondering about the people behind the faces, their lives before and after the frozen second they are trapped in.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
Inanna talking, saying things, she's sorry, doctors make mistakes, she's so sorry, new treatments every day, if there's anything she can do, so very sorry, on and on, saying nothing at all. Just noise.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
The world is always ending, for someone. It's a good line. I give it to the father of the child. He says it to his wife. "The world is always ending, for someone", he says. She is trying to quieten the baby, and does not hear him. I doubt it would matter if she did.
From the director's final screenplay in SIGNAL TO NOISE
I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again.
No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.
From the director's final screenplay in SIGNAL TO NOISE
Only, I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
Apocatastasis. What it means:
1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
2) Return to a previous condition
3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
Think about it.
The film director in SIGNAL TO NOISE
We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.
From SIGNAL TO NOISE
"For Inanna: Apocatastasis"
"You always did pick rotten titles."
Inanna begins to read the director's final screenplay in SIGNAL TO NOISE
The old woman took the umbrella, gratefully, and smiled her thanks. "You've a good heart," she told him. "Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go." Then she shook her head. "But mostly, it's not."
Neverwhere
There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.
Neverwhere
Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.
Neverwhere
The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.
Neverwhere