Love dark comics? Take a look at some of the best Sin City Quotes

Vol 1: Preludes and Nocturnes

But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living 
 for the price of wisdom is above rubies.

CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.
MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.
CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.
MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.
CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.
MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed.
CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying.
MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing.
CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding… planet-cremating.
MORPHEUS: I am the Universe; all things encompassing, all life embracing.
CHORONZON: I am Anti-Life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds… of everything. Sss. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?
MORPHEUS: I am hope.

I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the minds of the evil and wicked. Or just anybody I don’t like.

You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification in this or any other plane!

You get what anybody gets; you get a lifetime.

What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?

I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.

Vol 2: The Doll’s House

There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn.

And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women’s tale, and it is never told to men.

For love is no part of the dream-world. Love belongs to desire, and desire is always cruel.

And they left, slowly, one by one, with reluctance, leaving the safety of the light for the chill certainties of the darkness. It seemed like the night sucked them up, took them into its dark heart. It seemed like the darkness swallowed them 
 perhaps it did.

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

It means the world’s about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don’t even want to think about. It means that we’re just dolls. We don’t have a clue what’s really going down, we just kid ourselves that we’re in control of our lives while a paper’s thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they’re tired, or bored.

And Desire walks the endless pathways of its body, certain that he, or she, or it, is in sole and only control of its destiny. The only inhabitant of the twilight realm of Desire; and it feels nothing like a doll. Nothing like a doll at all.

Human beings are the creatures of desire. They twist and bend as I require it. If I thought otherwise, I would crack, like Delirium or I would abandon my realm, like our lost brother.

If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.

I am coming through the barriers you have erected in this mind. I am coming, though the way be ardous and strange. Nothing will stop me. As I travel, I admire the craftsmanship in the construction of this maze, admire the traps and pitfalls they have wrought. You have learned well, my servants. To force the child to construct these barriers insides its mind, in its effort to escape the physical world; to build an island of dream alone and untouched by the true Dreaming… This takes skill. My admiration does not lessen my anger. I am dream. I am coming.

Vol 3: Dream Country

The fraternity of critics, in reality a dark brethren, linked by profane rites and blood vows. To destroy an author they sacrifice a child and perform a critical mass.

Gryphons shouldn’t marry. Vampires don’t dance. A man who inherits a library card to the library in Alexandria. A rose bush, a nightingale, and a black rubber dog-collar.

Justice?" It repeated. “Justice is a delusion you will not find on this or any other sphere. And wisdom? Wisdom is no part of dreams, lithe walker, though dreams are a part of the sum of each life’s experiences, which is the only wisdom that matters. But revelation? That is the province of dream.

If enough of us dream, if a bare thousand of us dream, we can change the world. We can dream it anew! A world in which no cat suffers from the malice of humans. In which no cats are killed by human caprice. A world that we rule.

Dream the world. Not this pallid shadow of reality. Dream the world the way it truly is. A world in which all cats are queens and kings of creation. That is my message. And I shall keep moving, keep repeating it, until I die. Or until a thousand cats hear my words, and believe them, and dream, and we come again to paradise.

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

I am that merry wanderer of the night’? I am that giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb, more like it.

Things have changed, and will change more; and Gaia no longer welcomes us as once she did.

But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream… But the price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact — One sees more devils than vast hell can hold. That is the madman. The Lover, all as frantic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. And, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

And you’ve come for me? Blessed, merciful death. You’ve come to make it all stop?

When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job is finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.

Vol 4: Season of Mists

The garden of Destiny. You would know it if you saw it. After all, you will wander it until you die. Or beyond. For the paths are long, and even in death there is no ending to them.

The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny’s garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness.

Desire smells almost subliminally of summer peaches, and casts two shadows: one black and sharp-edged, the other translucent and forever wavering, like heat haze 
 Desire smiles in brief flashes, like sunlight glinting from a knife-edge. And there is much else that is knife-like about Desire 
 never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.

Despair, Desire’s sister and twin, is queen of her own bleak bourne. It is said that scattered through Despair’s domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart.

Destiny is the oldest of the Endless; in the beginning was the Word, and it was traced by hand on the first page of his book, before ever it was spoken aloud 
 Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of night. He leaves no footprints. He casts no shadow.

Delirium was once Delight. And although that was long ago now, even today her eyes are badly matched; one eye is a vivid emerald green, spattered with silver flecks that move; her other eye is vein blue. Who knows what Delirium sees, through her mismatched eyes?

To absent friends, lost loves, old gods and the seasons of mists. And may each and everyone of us always give the devil his due.

I am Breschau of Livonia. I ripped out the tongues of those who spoke against me, and cut the unborn babes from the wombs of my enemies women, that they would not become warriors to rise against me. I took my mother by force, and I strangled my sister when she would not consent to my advances. Soon my name was whispered in the night by mothers to terrify their babes into obedience, I am Breschau, who bathed in the blood of children. I am Breschau, who forced the true prophets of the lord to dance upon plates of hot iron, under which fires were burning, and I laughed as they danced. I am Breschau, and when my mistress was unfaithful to me, I cut the nose from her face and wore it about my neck. As for the woman, I had her sewn to her lover, and, skin to skin, I left them in the desert to be eaten by ravens, and I laughed as I heard them scream. I am Breschau, and this is my punishment.

I could never again be an angel 
 innocence, once lost, can never be regained.

Times have changed, and we have changed with them. We are expanding — assimilating other pantheons, later gods, new altars and icons. Marilyn Monroe is ours now, as are King Kong and Lady Liberty.

I’m the amazing Cain. If you enjoyed our show, tell your friends. If you didn’t, I trust you get throat cancer and die without ever again uttering another word. Goodnight.

There will be no more wanton violence; no further suffering, inflicted without reason or explanation. We will hurt you. And we are not sorry. But we do not do it to punish you. We do it to redeem you. Because afterward, you’ll be a better person 
 and because we love you. One day you’ll thank us for it.

Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. ‘The devil made me do it.’ I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

There must be a Hell. A place for demons. A place for the damned. Hell is Heaven’s reflection. Heaven’s shadow. They define each other. There must be a Hell for without Hell, Heaven has no meaning.

Vol 5: A Game of You

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — 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.

In the pale light of the Moon I play the game of you. Whoever I am. Whoever you are. All sense of where I am, of who I am and where I’m going, has been swallowed by the dark. And I walk through the stars and sky… a trinity of dreams beneath the moon.

And then it crumbled in his hand. It was just dust… Sand… A glittering, multicolored sand that fell away into the chilly wind at the end of the world.

Where others ask timorously, Thessalian, your kind commanded, directed, ordered. It galled us. But the others are dust now, and less than dust. And one day you, in your turn, will join them. And then our compact will be over, and you will be ours, as they are.

Vol 6: Fables and Reflections

It is sometimes a  mistake to climb, it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt.

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

Desire? You disappoint me. This evening’s display: bringing back a dead man to offer Norton the pleasures of the world. It was not very subtle.

They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints — 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world.

Will you kill all the poets, then, St. Just? Will you kill all the dreamers?

From that Time on, the Song of  Orpheus has always hovered at the Edge of my Perception; a Melody I can never fully recover, try howsoever I will. And do not doubt that there are many in Authority to whom I would sing it, if ’twere within my Power.

Listen, blood of my blood, although I’m a hard man to anger, and I love you deeply, if you interrupt me again so help me I’ll rip out your throat with my teeth.

The young man’s mother had died bringing him into the world; she gave him life, a small wooden finger-ring, and the name Vassily. There have been worse legacies.

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

Forewarned is seldom forearmed. Not even in the shifting zones.

There are really patterns. It was a revelation, of a kind. Dreams and sand and stories. Deserts and cities and time.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

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

“Abel, the younger brother, had lots of sheep, and he had given the land’s creator a sheep as present. Cain, who was the older, grew fruit and vegetables, and he’d given the land’s creator some of them. The creator liked the sheep best, because it was all funny and fluffy and white — “

“Because it was warm, steaming meat. It was a bleeding sacrifice, you bloody idiot!”

There was also in that room the Other Egg of the Phoenix. (For the Phoenix when its time comes to die lays two eggs, one black, one white: From the white egg hatches the Phoenix-bird itself, when its time is come, but what hatches from the black egg no one knows.)

You have called me here, Haroun. It is unwise to summon what you cannot dismiss.

Bodies are strange. Some people have real problems with the stuff that goes on inside them. You find out that inside someone you know there’s just mucus and meat and slime and bone. They menstruate, salivate, defecate and cry. You know? Sometimes it can just kill the romance. You know that?

Vol 7: Brief Lives

Some things are changeless. People love, and die, they dream, destroy, despair, go mad. They fulfill their destinies, live out the course of their lives. We fulfill our function, as they fulfill theirs…that will not change.

“I mean, does this always happen when a girlfriend walks out on him?”

“Not at all. For example, after the Nada affair he razed the Dreaming. It was a bleak, lonely desert for centuries. I remember the first flower that grew. The first time he smiled again 
”

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

“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.”

“Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you’ve forgotten the name of the person you’re introducing them to as well?” “No.”

I know how gods begin, Roger. We start as dreams.

Then we walk out of dreams into the land. We are worshipped and loved, and take power to ourselves. And then one day there’s no one left to worship us. And in the end, each little god and goddess takes its last journey back into dreams 
 and what comes after, not even we know.

The garden of Destiny. Look behind you: shadow-plays of memory are forever being enacted, on paths you walked too long ago.

Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother?Ido. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden. You would do well to remember that.

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.

I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn’t a proper place. I like in betweens.

Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.

When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget.

Hey, that’s life, flick it off if you can’t take a joke.

To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.

Three blind hummingbirds hang in the air like jewels of iridescent scarlet and cobalt; then, one by one, they fade, all color leeched from them, and fall lifeless into the mists, to be eaten by rats.

Despair places the cold metal barb of her hook onto the surface of her eye. And then she pushes, piercing cornea and lens, and ripping free the aqueous humor and vitreous humor to run like tears down her cheek, into her hand…The pain distracts her, a little. But still, she remembers…

Vol 8: World’s End

I don’t really like driving in snow. There’s something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eye, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It’s like tumbling into a field of stars.

You need help, matey. You and that there young lady. That red stuff, that’s blood that is. Meant to be on the inside, it is. Bad sign if it’s not on the inside, that’s what I says.

If a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams. That is where I believe we have come. We are in the dreams of the city. That’s why certain places hover on the brink of recognition; why we almost know where we are.

“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.”

We of Faerie are of the wild magic. We are not creatures of spells and grimoires. Wearespells, and we are written of in grimoires.

The words said over my father’s body were hollow and dumb, and I couldn’t find it in me to cry, not then. I knew I was watching the real thing here. There was true grief in each step they took across the sky, and they shouldered the casket as if they were shouldering the weight of the world.

She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don’t know. She probably didn’t even know I was there. But I’ll always love her. All my life.

It was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they’ll still love you, because they know you.

Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?

“Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.

Nothing you do in the White House matters. You know why not? Because as far as the mass of voting morons is concerned, while you’re in office, you’ll still be the worst single president they’ve ever had until you stop. Then it’s some other poor bastard’s turn. And even that doesn’t matter, because ten, twenty years later, they’ll look back on you, and wonder why they didn’t appreciate you when they had you…You don’t get to make a difference. You don’t get to do jack shit. You know what you get?…You get an entry in the history book, and every 15 minutes, every day at Disneyworld, an animatronic puppet wearing your face will wave or nod when the spotlight hits it.

In the manner of one recognizing a line from a familiar poem in a strange book.

Vol 9: The Kindly Ones

It’s never what they want, and if we give them what they think they want, they like it less than ever.

Been there, Remiel. Done that, wore the tee-shirt, ate the burger, bought the original cast album, choreographed the legions of the damned and orchestrated the screaming…

You didn’t join the rebellion, not because you felt I was wrong, but because you were too damned scared. What would you have done, had I won? Told me that you’d always supported me ideologically? That you were secretly cheering me on the whole time?

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

The gods we prayed to when we were young used up their time so long ago. They cannot answer anymore.

You don’t have to believe in God. But what aboutgods*? Eh? The plurality of powers and dominions. The lords and ladies of field and thorn, of asphalt and sewer, gods of telephone and whore, gods of hospital and car-crash?*

There is a madness needed to touch the gods, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild woods of madness.

I am the mother to Odin’s stallion, Sleipnir. I am the father of Fenrir sun-eater and of Hel half-rotted and of Jormungund the world-serpent. I am Loki Scar-Lip, Loki Skywalker, Loki Giant’s Child, Loki Lie-Smith. I am Loki, who is fire and wit and hate. I am Loki. And I will be under an obligation to no one.

You puzzle me, Dream-Weaver. Are you a spider who’s spun a web of cunning and deceit and now waits patiently for his prey to come to him; or are you a deer frozen by the light of a hunter’s flame, as disaster comes toward you?

And she wrapped her slimy body around his, and she whispered his name into his ear. And he screams, “Kill me, for God’s sake, just get it over with.” But she licked her lips with her long worm tongue, and she shakes her head. “A meal this good must never be hurried,” she says. “Just hold still boy, and let me enjoy myself.” And she takes her first, gentle bite from his cheek with her sharp, sharp teeth…

Dancing salamanders brought the children silver plates filled with exotic ice-creams of various flavors, and with fruits they had never seen before and would never see again 
 although they would dream of them, on rare occasions, until they died.

The things we do make echos. Our existence deforms the universe. That’s responsibility.

I am honor-bound to warn you to stay on the path through the castle. Straying from the path could mean your destruction.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you don’t let me in, I will turn you into a demon half-face waitress night-club lady with a crush on her boss, and I’ll make it so you’ve been that from the beginning of time to now and you’ll never ever know if you were anything else and it will itch inside your head worse than little bugses.

It’s the same old story 
 whatever it turns into on the way, whatever it is you originally undertake to spin or knit or weave, keep it going long enough and, in the end, my lilies, it’s always a winding sheet.

Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered by the evening, You can be me when I’m gone.

We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions

We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves.

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.

Can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.

I suppose the point you grow up is the point you let the dreams go.

There’s but three Furies found in spacious hell. But in a great man’s breast three thousand dwell.

Vol 10: The Wake

The bonds of family bind both ways. They bind us up, support us, help us, and they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together.

I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

I cared for him, very much. He was so wise; he seemed so certain of the rightness of his actions. And I, who do nothing but doubt, admired that in him.

He was a creature of hope, for dreams are hopes, and echoes of hopes, and I am a creature of despair.

It’s astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best.

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.

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.

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

Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up forever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one.

Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I’d fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, ‘Sothisis how it feels,’ and I would tie it up in pretty words. Iwatchedmy life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but Iwatchedmy hurt, and evenrelishedit, a little, for now I could write arealdeath, atrueloss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.

Summer is a time for popsicles.

But you will remember it, in the soft, lost, slumbering moments between waking and true sleep: remember the whispering voices of the Gods of Earth and Heaven, the piping laughter of innocent chaos, the frightened rusting of cold order…the voices of the living. The voices of the dead. They will haunt your sleep until you die.