"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..."
"There isn't one."
"Oh. I thought maybe there was..."
—Delirium and Dream (issue #43)
"But I did okay, didn't I? I mean I got, what, fifteen thousand years. That's pretty good, isn't it? I lived a pretty long time."
"You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less."
"You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less."
—Bernie Capax 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."
"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."
"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)
"It's like, that people... well, that 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."
— Barbie ("A Game of You" Issue #37)
"There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old. Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or a thousand, to be an unusual span. There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tigernote , the megatherium, the cave bear. There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis. (The first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, and they came later). There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. (There were a few; fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years.) There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust. How well do you know your neighbors? Your friends? Your lovers? Walk the streets of any city, and stare carefully at the people who pass you and wonder, and know this: They are there too. The old ones."
— narration (issue #43)
