I discovered Sandman back in year 10, I was 15 at the time. From the first pages of Season of Mists I knew I was reading something amazing, something different, something that would change the way I looked at things. I was right on all three accounts.

Since then I've re-read the series at least once every year, just to re-fresh my memory and to simply take in the masterpiece. So, in accordance with this yearly event I re-read The Kindly Ones and the Wake this morning. It is so hard to describe how I feel at the moment. My mind is still so caught up with the content, the depth, and the words of this volume. The one thing that always strike me while reading The Kindly Ones is the inevitability of everything, the step-by-step process of planning one's own death, and of Morpheus' deceit, even to himself.

There are so many quotes in this volume. To start the ball rolling, quotes from the really famous scene. The one that made me cry on my first read.

Death - "What are you doing?"

Dream - "Waiting for you."

....................


Death - "The only reason you've got yourself into this mess is because this is where you wanted to be. There's personal responsibility too, y'know? Not only the kind you're always talking about... Destruction simply left... and took off into the forever. You could have done that."

Dream - "No, I could not."

Death - "No, you couldn't, could you?"

Dream - "I have made all the preparations necessary."

Death - "You've been making them for ages. You just didn't let yourself know that was what you were doing."

......................


Death - "Give me your hand."

And Daniel becomes what he was born to be, his mortality having been burnt away by Loki and Puck.

Something Odin said, which I had missed on the past twenty or so re-reading of this volume.

Odin - "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 to you?"

And of course, figures that he would be both.

Also, Thessaly kicks major arse. She's the type of woman that I want to be.

Dream - "I did not intend to hurt you."
Thessaly - "And what if you did not? Intent and outcome are so rarely coincident."

RABU Thessaly!!

And Lyta Hall. Because no matter how much I may hate her, I pity her far more.

Lyta Hall - "He touches my neck and I don't want him touching my neck so I move his arm away and there's crunching noise, and he starts to saying I have broken his arm-bone and he winds up going off in an ambulance. The bones in the arm are called ulna, the radius, and the humerus."

Yes. She was certifiably insane at the time.

And now we move to The Wake, which I will only quote one person, because really, it sums up everything so perfectly.

Lucien - "Sometimes, I think, perhaps, one must change or die. And in the end, there were, perhaps limits to how much he could let himself change."

And now I'm going to go and drink some coffee, and re-read The Kindly Ones.