"My mother, she eroded my adolescence, chipping me into the shape she'd have been if she hadn't had me. She pushed me into adventuring, fussing over my career, trying to live her life through me."

"I'm through thinking about my life, looking back at all my stupid memories. It's been a dumb life, and if there is a design, it's a dumb design!"

"(Examining Dan's Nite Owl II utility belt.) What else have you got in there? Chocolate rations? Boy Scout knife? Army-issue contraceptives?"

"I want you to love me. I want you to love me because we're not dead. Here..take these off. I want to see you. I want to see you and taste you and smell you. Just because I can. Oh God, it's so damn good being alive."

"In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon."

"I am disappointed, Veidt. Very disappointed. Restructuring myself after the subtraction of my intrinsic field was the first trick I learned. It didn't kill Osterman... Did you think it would kill me? I've walked across the surface of the sun. I've seen events so tiny and so fast they hardly can be said to have occurred at all. But you... you're just a man. And the world's smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite."

"Yes. Anybody in the world. .. But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg. Come, dry your eyes. And let's go home."

"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle."

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."

"There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."

"I am two-hundred and twenty-seven million kilometers from the sun. Its light is already ten minutes old. It will not reach Pluto for another two hours. Two hours into my future, I observe meteorites from a glass balcony, thinking about my father. Twelve seconds, into my past, I open my fingers. The photograph is falling. I am watching the stars. Halley's Comet tumbles through the solar system on its great, seventy-six year ellipse. My father admired the sky for its precision. He repaired watches. It's 1945, I sit in a Brooklyn kitchen, fascinated by an arrangement of cogs on black velvet. I am sixteen years old. It is 1985. I am on Mars. I am fifty-six years old. The photograph lies at my feet; falls from my fingers, is in my hand. I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space and time. I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion."

"They claim their labors are to build a heaven, yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman. It's too late. Always has been, always will be...too late."

"I am tired of Earth, these people. I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives."

"Everything is preordained. Even my responses."

"They call me Dr. Manhattan. They explain the name has been chosen for the ominous associations it will raise in America's enemies. The marketing boys say I need a logo. If I'm to have a symbol it shall be one I respect. [draws a symbol of a hydrogen atom on his head]"

"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Pregnant woman. Gunned her down. Bang. And y'know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into god damn snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia...but you didn't lift a finger! You don't really give a damn about human beings. I've watched you. You never cared about what's her name, Janey Slater, even before you ditched her. Soon you won't be interested in Sally Jupiter's little girl, either. You're driftin' outta touch, Doc. You're turnin' into a flake. God help us all."

"Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense."

"What happened to us? What happened to the American Dream?"

"Oh God, I probably sound so Devo right?"

"Y'know, this must be how ordinary people feel. This must be how ordinary people feel around us."

"I don't mind being the smartest man in the world, I just wish it wasn't this one."

"I suppose I'd have had to catch the bullet, wouldn't I?"

"My parents reached America the year I was born, 1939. Entering school, I was already exceptionally bright, my perfect scores on early test papers arousing such suspicion that I carefully achieved only average grades thereafter. What caused such precociousness? My parents were intellectually unremarkable, possessing no obvious genetic advantages. Perhaps I decided to be intelligent rather than otherwise? Perhaps we all make such decisions, though that seems a callous doctrine. By seventeen, my parents were both dead, and I faced a different decision. My inheritance offered life long idle luxury, and yet, needing nothing, I burned with the paradoxical urge to do everything. Do you understand? My intellect set me apart. Faced with difficult choices, I knew nobody whose advice might prove useful. Nobody living. The only human being with whom I felt any kinship died three hundred years before the birth of Christ. Alexander of Macedonia. I idolized him. A young army commander, he'd swept along the coasts of Turkey and Phoenicia, subduing Egypt before turning his armies towards Persia. He died, thirty-three, ruling most of the civilized world. Ruling without barbarism! At Alexandria, he instituted the ancient world's greatest seat of learning. True, people died ... perhaps unnecessarily, though who can judge such things? Yet how he nearly approached his vision of a united world! I was determined to measure my success against his. Firstly, I gave away my inheritance. to demonstrate the possibility of achieving anything starting from nothing. Next, I departed for Northern Turkey, to retrace my hero's steps. I wanted to match his accomplishment, bringing an age of illumination to a benighted world. Heh. I wanted to have something to say should we meet in the hall of legends. I followed the path of Alexander's war machine along the black sea coast, imagining his armies taking port after port, blood on ancient bronze. Perhaps because of the challenge it represented: the ancient world's greatest puzzle was there, a knot that couldn't be untied. Alexander cut it in two with his sword. Lateral thinking, you see. Centuries ahead of his time. Heading south, he entered Egypt through Memphis, where they proclaimed him son of Amon, judge of the dead, whose name means "hidden one." Under rule from Alexandria, the classic culture of the great Pharaohs was restored. I followed him through Babylon, up through Kabul to Samarkhand then down the Indus, where he met the first elephants of war. Where he'd turned back to quell dissent at home, I travelled on, through China and Tibet, gathering martial wisdom as I went. Alexander returned to Babylon to die of an infection, aged thirty-three, amongst its ruined ziggurats. I saw at last his failings. He'd not united all the world, nor built a unity that would survive him. Disillusioned, but determined, to complete my odyssey, I followed his corpse to its resting place in Alexandria. The night before returning to America, I wandered into the desert and ate a ball of hashish I'd been given in Tibet. The ensuing vision transformed me. Wading through powdered history, I heard dead kings walking underground, heard fanfares through human skulls. Alexander had merely resurrected an age of Pharaohs, their wisdom, truly immortal, now inspired me. What intellectual magnificence their system encouraged.. Ptolemy seeking the universe's pivot from his light-house at Pharos, Eratosthenes, measuring the world using only shadows … their greatest secrets entrusted to their servants, buried alive with them in sand-flooded chambers. Adopting Ramses the Second's Greek name and Alexander's free-booting style, I resolved to apply antiquity's teachings to today's world. Thus began my path to conquest … conquest not of men. But of the evils that beset them. Today, that conquest becomes assured, in which your unquestioning assistance has proven invaluable. Do you comprehend the triumph which you have contributed, the secret glory that it affords? Do you understand my shame at so inadequate a reward?"

"What in my life, does not deserve celebrating?"

"It was a dark and stormy nightmare..."

"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."

"When I first met you I thought you were gay." "Why? 'Cos I'm English?" "Uh-uh. Because you seemed to know so many people who were dead." "...That's not funny." "No. It's not, is it?"

"There were a lot of Moors and Africans in Spain and Italy in the old days. Remember Othello? Trust me, if Catherine of Aragon had been in Alabama in the 1950s they'd have made her ride in the back of the bus."

"We never even noticed the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a load of bloody Italians poncing around claiming to be the golden age of the Greeks come around again. Nobody in England had even heard of the Renaissance until it had been over for centuries."