“ Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.7K
“ 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. But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!. 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; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.3K
“ Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It's taken me a long time to realize that. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 22
“ Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.2K
“ The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 545
“ Nite Owl II: But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to America? What's happened to the American dream? The Comedian: It came true. You're lookin' at it. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3K
“ Evey Hammond: Who are you? V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask. Evey Hammond: Well I can see that. V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.8K
“ We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.1K
“ If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning. They're right. It does. However much you beg it to stop. It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember. It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life... All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom. Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor. Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks. And then the world turns... And somebody falls off... And oh God it's such a long way down. Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller... Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible. We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth. Trying to measure how far we have to fall. No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives... Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold. "Time's a great healer." "At least it was quick." "The world keeps turning." Oh Alec— Alec's dead. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 660
“ You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.' 'You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?' 'You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.5K
“ I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you. Valerie ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 1.6K
“ To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
“ It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.3K
“ It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos William Gull ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.3K
“ The world would end as it began, as beatific arbour, and if any family crests or luminary busts or graven names of institutions were yet visible between the droning hives and honeysuckle, they would be by then wiped clean of any meaning. Meaning was a candlelight in everything that lurched and shifted in the circumstantial breezes of each instant, never twice the same. Significance was a phenomenon of Now that could not be contained inside an urn or monolith. It was a hurricane entirely of the present, an unending swirl of boiling change, and as he stood there gazing out towards the city's rim, across the granite fields of time towards the calendar's far tattered edges, Snowy Vernall was a stormrod, crackling and exultant, at the cyclone's dangerous and brilliant eye. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.5K
“ If Mr. Darwin were to be believed, then it was from the timeless dapple of the forest's canopy that men had first descended, and it was the forest's roots that drank men's bodies when they died, returned their vital salts back to the prehistoric treetops in gold elevator cages made of sap. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.4K
“ It made him laugh, although not literally. Where did they think that everything, including them, was going to go? Snowy was only twentysix at this point in the span of him, and he supposed that there were those who'd say he hadn't yet seen much of life, but even so he knew that life was a spectacular construction, more secure than people generally thought, and that it would be harder getting out of their existence than they probably imagined. Human beings ended up arranging their priorities without being aware of the whole story, the whole picture. Cenotaphs would turn out to be less important than the sunny days missed in their making. Things of beauty, Snowy knew, should be wrought purely for their own sake and not made into elaborate headstones stating only that somebody was once here. Not when no one was going anywhere. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.3K
“ John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly threeplaned existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. Theywere trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factoryblack ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roofridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammothtrodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarrythroated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnetpattern of its loops and whorls. On the looseshoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clockgoverned scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, selfinfatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.7K
“ ... in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images. The tree's shape is its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent timestatue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.5K
“ Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.2K
“ I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been selftaught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.7K
“ I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been selftaught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 1.9K
“ If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you've got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 3.3K
“ Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 1.7K
“ To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films. ”
- Alan Moore- Copy
- 2.8K
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