The Sandman

“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 a whole suit of armour, so that 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 didn’t ask for it.

They did 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 simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ 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 real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.

I hate love.”

– Rose Walker in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman

~

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the 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. Thousands maybe.”

* all quotes & illustrations copyright Neil Gaiman