Quotes by Alan Moore

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if youre lucky.

Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.

Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical theyre 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 thats 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 anothers 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 lets go home.

Real life is messy, inconsistent, and its seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. Its taken me a long time to realize that.

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

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.

The past cant hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, thats not the real you. Thats not who you are inside.

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. Im not questioning your powers of observation Im merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is

We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who watches the watchmen?

You were already in a prison. Youve 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? Its 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 didnt put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.Youre wrong! Its just life, thats all! Its just how life is. Its what weve got to put up with. Its all weve got. What gives you the right to decide its not good enough?Youre in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. Youve been in a prison so long, you no longer believe theres a world outside. Thats because youre afraid, Evey. Youre afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. Youre afraid because freedom is terrifying. Dont 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 youd 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.

If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.Theyre 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 whats waiting at the bottom.Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each others 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 its 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 theyre 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.Times a great healer.At least it was quick.The world keeps turning.Oh Alec—Alecs dead.

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. Its an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but thats not the most important thing. Its the work itself.

The third and, given due consideration, most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favor.

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 self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Its early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet.

Its 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 theyre related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that theres a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.

It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.

Books require titles reading them doesnt

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.Was Rorschach.Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?