Absurdism

"Bastian had shown the lion the inscription on the reverse side of the Gem. "What do you suppose it means?" he asked. "'DO WHAT YOU WISH.' That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don't you think so?" All at once Grograman's face looked alarmingly grave, and his eyes glowed. "No," he said in his deep, rumbling voice. "It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult." "What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?" "It's your own deepest secret and you yourself don't know it." "How can I find out?" "By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want." "That doesn't sound so hard," said Bastian. "It is the most dangerous of all journeys." "Why?" Bastian asked. "I'm not afraid." "That isn't it," Grograman rumbled. "It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there's no other journey on which it's so easy to lose yourself forever.""

"When it come to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts."

"There is in Fantastica a certain place from which one can go anywhere and which can be reached from anywhere. We call it the Temple of a Thousand Doors. No one has ever seen it from outside. The inside is a maze of doors. Anyone wishing to know it must dare to enter it."

""Have you seen the Nothing, sonny?" "Yes, many times." "What does it look like?" "As if one were blind." "That's right – and when you get to the human world, the Nothing will cling to you. You'll be like a contagious disease that makes humans blind, so they can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion. Do you know what you and your kind are called there?" "No," Atreyu whispered. "Lies!" Gmork barked."

"Oh, nothing can happen more than once, But all things must happen one day Over hill and dale, over wood and stream, My dying voice will blow away..."

"If no one has told you who or what Uyulala is, there must be a reason. And before I know what that reason is, I can't decide whether someone who hasn't seen her with his own eyes has a right to know."

"The sphinxes shut their eyes for some travelers and let them through. The question that no one has answered up until now is this: Why one traveler and not another? Because you mustn't suppose they let wise, brave, or good people through, and keep the stupid, cowardly, and wicked out. Not a bit of it! With my own eyes I've seen them admit stupid fools and treacherous knaves, while decent, sensible people have given up after being kept waiting for months. And it seems to make no difference whether a person has some serious reason for consulting the Oracle, or whether he's just come for the fun of it."

"Luckdragons are among the strangest animals in Fantastica. They bear no resemblance to ordinary dragons, which look like loathsome snakes and live in deep caves, diffusing a noxious stench and guarding some real or imaginary treasure. Such spawn of chaos are usually wicked or ill-tempered, they have batlike wings with which they can rise clumsily and noisily into the air, and they spew fire and smoke. Luckdragons are creatures of air, warmth, and pure joy. Despite their great size, they are as light as a summer cloud, and consequently need no wings for flying. They swim in the air of heaven as fish swim in water. Seen from the earth, they look like slow lightning flashes. The most amazing thing about them is their song. Their voice sounds like the golden note of a large bell, and when they speak softly the bell seems to be ringing in the distance. Anyone who has heard this sound will remember it as long as he lives and tell his grandchildren about it."

"What I've started I must finish. I've gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward."

"Your life is short, son. Ours is long. Much too long. But we both live in time. You a short time. We a long time. The Childlike Empress has always been there. But she's not old. She has always been young. She still is. Her life isn't measured by time, but by names. She needs a new name. She keeps needing new names."

"AURYN gives you great power ... but you must not make use of it. For the Childlike Empress herself never makes use of her power. AURYN will protect you and guide you, but whatever comes your way you must never interfere, because from this moment on your own opinion ceases to count. For that same reason you must go unarmed. You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise, just as it is in the eyes of the Childlike Empress. You may only search and inquire, never judge. Always remember that, Atreyu!"

"A customer at Lux's, drunk and flirtatious, peeks beneath Mazikeen's half-mask. He satisfies his curiosity, as he loses, one after the other, his drink, his lunch, and his sanity. Mazikeen has no patience with men."

"This will be felt across worlds and days as a reality storm; and, as it plays its course, conflicting realities will fall and spin and shatter across time and existence."

"They aren't your memories." "They are all I have."

"No miracles. No magic. No dreams. Just pain and death, and Visa slips."

"On reflection, while I cannot give you the thing itself, I could give you a dream of my love." "I already have that, my Lord."

"How... how dare you let that happen, Lord? How dare you?" "You will not speak to me like that, Lucien." "I doubt I'll be alive tomorrow, Lord. On that basis I find it particularly easy to say exactly what I think..."

"Yeah? Well, eumenides this!"

"Gods fear us. Demons fear us. We have hounded kings and angels. We have taken vengeance on worlds and universes. We are the Kindly Ones. We are the Eumenides."

"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare—a pumpkin with a gun."

"You guys're an elite corps. [khoff!] They say I'm hard and I am hard. They say I am a bastard, and I'll tell you what, I am a bastard. A hard, tough bastard. A tough, hard bastard with a pumpkin for a head. But that doesn't mean I can't be proud'a you dumb lugs. And I am proud of you. All'a you—Wycziezbsky, O'Brien, McTavish, Silverstein, Pucci, and the little Norwegian. While some guys have skedaddled, and others have bolted into the castle, we're the Joe's that have faced the facts. And the facts are this. Is this. Are... whatever. [khoff] [khoff] We're at war."

"Now, majesty, banishment, decapitation, or something lingering with boiling oil in it somewhere?" "Cluracan, you are a rascal..."

"I bind you, Loki Sky Walker, malice-monger. I bind you with the guts of Narvi, your son. I bind you with frost and with fire, and with the weight of the world."

"A Puck is harder by far to hurt than some little lord of malice from the lands of ice and snow. We Pucks are old and hard and wild..."

"I am the Puck, called Robin Goodfellow. I am a trickster, an antic prankster, a will o' the wisp. "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loose upon the world." That's me."

"It was like a bad TV show. "He's a reincarnated serial killer—his partner's a bird. They're cops.""

"Listen, an eye's just an eye. A few more days, and he'll be something not even a raven would eat. Over to the ants..."

"The thing you ought to remember about ravens, is that we belong equally to both genders. You don't see that every day. But we're as likely to be the Morrigan's as Odin's, as likely to be Eve's as Dream's."

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole 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."

"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."

"The war has been shaping up quite nicely on all fronts, with no more than a nudge here and a tickle there. … People do insist on making life difficult for themselves. Peculiar things people... dead certain they know what they need. Dead wrong, more often than not. Stubborn as goats in a herd. Still even the dissidents have their uses. No need to search far for viable offerings these days..."

"In Faerie, there is only one time : Now. Twilight."

"I don't know what holds the bloody world together. Unless it's Magic."

"Love is the stuff that keeps things moving so they stay together. Fear is the stuff that makes things hold so still they fall apart. And sometimes you can have both of them inside you pushing and pulling you around, and thats when you cry or laugh."

"In this film, this loony preacher says that there's love and there's fear. And that's what makes the world like it is. I think that's almost right. I think it really comes down to love and fear. Sort of. Even though nobody ever talks about love and fear in science lessons."

"From a mundane standpoint, one might merely observe that Neil has arranged appearances here by every major occult figure in DC's history, to the possible end of introducing a new series character. And I do wonder whether Timothy will be back. It is more than a clever story however. It is rich and resonant. Like all good writing it causes the mind to wander off down byways by arousing speculations and leaving them to simmer... Neil Gaiman is a writer I have resolved to watch, and so far the effort has never failed to return more than the price of admission to his worlds."

"This is a work of fiction. Any resemblence to any real people (living, dead, or stolen by fairies), or to any real animals, gods, witches, countries, and events (magical or otherwise) is just blind luck, or so we hope."

"Death is the only major character whose visuals didn't spring from me; that credit goes to Mike Dringenberg. In my original Sandman outline, I suggested Death look like rock star Nico in 1968, with the perfect cheekbones and perfect face she has on the cover of her Chelsea Girl album. But Mike Dringenberg had his own ideas, so he sent me a drawing based on a woman he knew named Cinnamon—the drawing that was later printed in Sandman 11—and I looked at it and had the immediate reaction of, "Wow. That's really cool." Later that day, Dave McKean and I went to dinner in Chelsea at the My Old Dutch Pancake House and the waitress who served us was a kind of vision. She was American, had long black hair, was dressed entirely in black—black jeans, T-shirt, etc.—and wore a big silver ankh on a silver necklace. And she looked exactly like Mike Dringenberg's drawing of Death."

"Roger Zelazny died as I completed the first chapter of The Wake and his memorial informed the second chapter."

"Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture: as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn't him."

"Look, I'm sorry it's over too. But good things have to end; stories have to end. It's what gives them meaning."

"I wanted a tale of graceful ends. I wanted a play about a king who ... leaves his kingdom. ... About a man who turns his back on magic. ... I am Prince of Stories, Will; but I have no story of my own. Nor shall I ever. ... I thank you."

"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." "But that is precisely where you are now, Will."

"Only the phoenix arises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."

"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."

"But truth or no, still I behaved 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."