The Sandman/Quotes

"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."

—Dream (issue #8)

"I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it."

—Delirium (issue #21)

"A toast: To absent friend, lost loves, old Gods, and the season of mists. And may each and every one of us always give the devil his due."

—Hob Gadling (issue #22)

"We do what we must, Lucien. Sometimes we can choose the path we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all."

—Dream (issue #22)

"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..."

—Delirium and Dream (issue #43)

"But...is that it? Is that all I get?"

"You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less."

—Bernie and Death (issue #43)

"Um, what's the name of the word for things not being the same always? You know, I'm sure there is one. Isn't there? There must be a word for it … the thing that lets you know time is happening. Is there a word?"

"Change."

—Delirium and Dream (issue #43)

"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend … I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend."

—Destruction (issue #48)

"If the city was dreaming," he told me, "then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things. What I fear," he said, "is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise."

—The Storyteller (issue #51)

"There's a downstairs in everybody. That's where we live."

—The Kindly Ones (issue #58)

"I met someone who changed my mind about a lot of things."
"I'd like to meet her."
"It's a he. And I don't even think he exists. He's just a little voice in the back of my head, saying..."
"Yes?"

"Sometimes you wake up, sometimes the fall kills you, and sometimes when you fall, you fly."

—Todd and Janet ("Fear of Falling")

"Thou hast made the Furies cry, Orpheus. They will never forgive you for that."

—Queen Persephone (The Song of Orpheus)