I have been reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series recently. Out of the 10 first volumes I have completed 8 and two are still remaining. The Sandman is the Lord of Dreams, and I have found a few lines worth quoting from the series…

And what do you want from me?
Everything. What else is there to want?

Am I dreaming?
Not a bit of it. Quite the reverse if anything.

Getting what you want and being happy are two quite different things.

If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait until there is nothing left to wait for.

You really are just what you look like you are.

I do not know. I think so.

We do not represent them. We are them.

They say death is kinder than he is.

His hot fingers are already invading her soft curves and moist crevices.

Sleep until life wakes you.

It isn’t fair, but it is right.

Eventually, it begins to get dark.

There is a joy in there, of course, and love, and touching.
The presence that makes the absence unbearable.

Her kiss is a deep ocean.
Her kiss is not a deep ocean.
Her kiss is the grey sky.

Her kiss is a blind alley.

Her kiss is her touch is her breath
is her fingers is what remains
after the laughing is over.

Her kiss is the blackness.
Her kiss is not the blackness.

Her kiss is a black dog.
That follows you in the darkness.

And people ask,
Does despair despair?
Does dream dream?
Does desire desire?

Is everything over?
No, its just begun.

If you can’t be happy when you are, you can’t be happy anywhere.

Hell is other people.

To be despair. It is a portrait.
Only close your eyes and feel.

They are after all, all we have.

Who knew? Who could have known?

I have heard the language of the apocalypses, and now I will embrace silence.

That’s not unlikely. This is unlikely.

You don’t believe me. I don’t mind, I don’t always believe me either.

It cannot be stolen. It cannot be given away.

Perhaps one of our problems may prove a solution to the other.

But this kind of thing, doesn’t happen to you, does it? It happens to other people.

I am coming, though the way is ardous and strange.

My admiration doesn’t lessen my anger.

Great stories will always return to their original forms.

I have learnt from my mistakes, but I have had more time to commit more mistakes.

She isn’t yours Nathan. She belongs to no one, except herself.

A black mirror made to reflect everything about itself that humanity will not confront.

For all of you, the dream is over. I have taken it away from you.

I don’t understand it, but I believe it.

If my dream was true, then everthing we know, everything that we think we know is a lie.

When its just you and a blank sheet of paper.

If that is what you wish, it is done.

Is anything forever?

It’s a fools prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

His folly, is no fault of mine.

I am that merry wanderer of night.

It never happened and yet it is true.

And it is forever summers twilight…

And I wonder, why I wonder…

But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.

Things need not have happened to be true.

You make your own hell.

And who might you be?

But I know of things no one else knows.

To absent friends, lost loves and old gods, and the season of mists; may each and every one of us give the devil his due.

…as if merely saying something were enough to make it true.

…it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.

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

Innocence, once lost, can never be regained.

The kind where you know it is a nightmare, but you still can’t wake yourself up.

I think hell is something you carry around you, not somewhere you go.

Your impertinence invites my severest displeasure.

Times have changed and we have changed with them.

Do not wander from the path when you return.

If only it were that easy.

I never thought disposing of the unwanted would be so hard.

There must be a hell, for without hell heaven has no meaning.

As such though I regret it, I cannot fault it.

Tell her that we need to talk.

We will hurt you and we are not sorry.

The land is far from lost.

So what are we waiting for, exactly? I mean, if that is not a dumb question?

However, I am not sure that I know the answer.

We are in the twilightzone.

I don’t have to kill a rabbit, do I?

Shit in one hand and wish in other, see which fills up first.

I’d been lying so hard I’d convinced myself I was telling them the truth.

Sometimes inaction itself is action.

It was freely given and well meant.

I don’t think home is a place anymore. I think it is a state of mind.

For they have sown the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind.

We should take our goodbyes whenever we can.

Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a matress of corpses.

Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered.

The truth here is a matter of conjecture.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem to lightly.

We write our names in the sand, then waves roll and wash them away.

She ought to be mine, but she isn’t, is she?

His madness keeps him sane.

What more than that a man could desire?

For the lesson perhaps, if for nothing else.

Values’s in what people think. Not in what’s real. Value’s in dreams, boy.

You shouldn’t trust the storyteller; only trust the story.

wishes are best left sometimes ungranted…

Am I arguing with a dream?

I’ll wake you up and you will go where dreams go.

And forewarned is seldom forearmed.

You come in, you do not go out again.

A good mystery can last forever.

For those were the days of wonder.

It is unwise to summon what you cannot dismiss.

It has been far too long since we sat beneath the summer moon together and talked of pleasant fripperies, of that and this, and left others to speak sensible things of import and consequence.

I do not wish. I know. What must happen, will happen.That is the way of it.

There’s is something I want and I can’t have it and I am going to take it anyway. That’s my problem.

Somethings are too big to be seen, some emotions are too huge to be felt.

I think you are more in love with the idea of your dead love than you were with the girl herself.

There will be conditions, but then, there always are.

Thou hast made the furies cry.

There are always rules.

He is not one to forget a slight. Nor to forgive.

But he does not change. He will not. Perhaps he cannot.

You do not give. We take.

But you have made your own errors. It was your own life.

I’m not blessed or merciful. I’m just me.

Someone once brought me a flower, clandestinely. That means I do not know who it was. And I never saw the flower, either. Maybe they never brought it after all.

Ah, that is unlike you.What’s wrong?

And it distresses me to see you troubled.

I hate being nowhere.

We shall seek answers. We may seek questions also.

Shadow plays of memory are forever being enacted, on paths that you walked on not too long ago.

Life is a strange way of describing our experience.

I can do that if I have to.

And somebody said he wouldn’t keep going on about a perfectly understandable mistake that anyone could have made.

Don’t drink the cup, just the coffee.

Because there’s no such thing as one sided coin.

Why does it seem like none of us, know what we are doing?

Nothing new can exist without destroying the old.

One cannot begin a new dream without abandoning the last.

Life like time is a journey through darkness.

What’s done can’t be undone.

We do not always accomplish what we set out to do.

Our journey is over, all debts are paid.

… in a manner of recognizing a line from a familiar poem in a strange book.

Nobody is fine on their own. people need people.

It wasn’t that the things got bad, but they were no more spectacularly good.

And you never get to learn what happens to anyone else.

It is fearful thing to be haunted by those who loved you once, it is fearful to haunt those one loves.

There is a thin line between intoxication and unconsciousness, and I think he is about to cross it.

There are rumours, but that is all they are.

Like there was nothing left to hold on to. Nothing left to believe.