Alan Moore Watchmen Rorschach Quotes

I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Life seems harsh, and cruel. Says he feels all alone in threatening world. Doctor says: "Treatment is simple. The great clown - Pagliacci - is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. "But doctor ... " he says "I am Pagliacci." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. ~ Alan Moore

Roschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.
The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!" ... and I'll look down and whisper "No. ~ Alan Moore

I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of 'Watchmen,' his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse. ~ Susanna Clarke

The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire. ~ Dave Gibbons

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change. ~ Alan Moore

Who watches the watchmen? ~ Alan Moore

Laurie:
Her pain, her fears, her whole life, y' know? I mean, ordinary people, right? All the things that happen to them... doesn't that move you more than a bunch of rubble? ~ Alan Moore

I believe he's a man of great integrity, but he seems to see the world in very black and white. Manichean terms. I personally believe that to be an intellectual limitation. ~ Alan Moore

It's not easy to convey to someone who doesn't read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since 'Watchmen.' ~ Susanna Clarke

There's no such thing as quitting. Just sometimes there's a longer pause between relapses, right? ~ Alan Moore

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

They claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman. It's too late. Always has been, always will be ... too late. ~ Alan Moore

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal? ~ Alan Moore

Crazed with helplessness, I cursed God and wept, wondering if he wept also. ~ Alan Moore

Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there ... a clock without a craftsman. ~ Alan Moore

Please! Don't all leave. Somebody has to do it, don't you see? Somebody has to save the world ... ~ Alan Moore

Rorshach's journal. October 16, 1985. Been waiting in Moloch's fridge for three hours. Ate two raw eggs and packet of honey mustard sauce. Just realized I am sitting on baking soda. Freezing ass off. Really have to take leak. ~ Alan Moore

Benny Anger: What's up, doc?
Doc Manhattan: "Up" is a relative concept; it has no intrinsic value. ~ Alan Moore

Are you like, a crazy person?
I'm quite sure they will say so. ~ Alan Moore

I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it. ~ Neil Gaiman

I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart.
I am rain.
I cannot be contained ~ Alan Moore

Faith is for sissies who daren't go and look for themselves. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

I really can't be bothered going to a barber. And shaving every morning, that's nightmarish. I spent my teenage years covered in tiny little bits of toilet paper. ~ Alan Moore

There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet. ~ Alan Moore

The ending is nearer than you think, and it is already written. All that we have left to choose is the correct moment to begin. ~ Alan Moore

Nothing's that simple, not even things that are simply awful. ~ Alan Moore

In our every cell, furled at the nucleus, there is a ribbon two yards long and just ten atoms wide. Over a hundred million miles of DNA in very human individual, enough to wrap five million times around our world and make the Midgard serpent blush for shame, make even the Ourobouros worm swallow hard in disbelief. This snake-god, nucleotide, twice twisted, scaled in adenine and cytosine, in thymine and in guanine, is a one-man show, will be the actors, props and setting, be the apple and the garden both. The player bides his time, awaits his entrance to a drum-roll of igniting binaries. This is the only dance in town, this anaconda tango, this slow spiral up through time from witless dirt to paramecium, from blind mechanic organism to awareness. There, below the birthing stars, Life sways and improvises. Every poignant gesture drips with slapstick; pathos; an unbearably affecting bravery. To dare this stage, this huge and overwhelming venue. Squinting through the stellar footlights, hoping there's an audience, that there's someone out there, but dancing anyway. But dancing anyway. ~ Alan Moore

I've been dog rough, half blind and barking mad for years but you don't catch me going on about it. ~ Alan Moore

'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him. ~ Graham Moore

Remember? Ohh, I wouldn't do that! Remembering's dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place.
"The past tense", I supposed you'd call it. Ha ha ha. ~ Alan Moore

Nothing Alan Moore writes can be blah-blah-blahed," Park said solemnly.
Eleanor shrugged and bit her lip.
"I'm beginning to think you shouldn't have started reading comics with a book that completely deconstructs the last fifty years of the genre," he said.
"All I'm hearing is blah, blah, blah, genre. ~ Rainbow Rowell

I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief. ~ Alan Moore

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...

Wrappi ~ Alan Moore

I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it. ~ Graham Moore

If gods are transcendent ideas, then the idea of a god IS a god. ~ Alan Moore

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation - that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination. ~ Alan Moore

I'd prefer to include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence. ~ Alan Moore

Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember. ~ Alan Moore

Dr. Malcolm Long: Walter, is what happened to Kitty Genovese really proof that the whole of mankind is rotten? I think you've been conditioned with a negative worldview. There are good people, too, like...

Rorschach: Like you?

Dr. Malcolm Long: Me? Oh, well, I wouldn't say that. I...

Rorschach: No. You just think it. Think you're 'good people'. Why are you spending so much time with me, Doctor?

Dr. Malcolm Long: Uh...well, because I care about you, and because I want to make you well...

Rorschach: Other people, down in cells. Behavior more extreme than mine. You don't spend any time with them...but then, they're not famous. Won't get your name in the journals. You don't want to make me well. Just want to know what makes me sick. You'll find out. Have patience, Doctor. You'll find out. ~ Alan Moore

Things are tough all over, cupcake, an' it rains on the just an' the unjust alike ... except in California. ~ Alan Moore

I've come to think that the universe is a four-dimensional site in which nothing is changing and nothing is moving. The only thing that is moving along the time axis is our consciousness. The past is still there, the future has always been here. Every moment that has existed or will ever exist is all part of this giant hyper-moment of space-time. ~ Alan Moore

Who the hell is Warren Ellis again?"
Hardison gaped at the man. "Only one of the greatest comics writers in the past twenty years. Might as well ask who Alan Moore is, or Frank Miller, or Mark Waid, or Brian Michael Bendis, or Marv Wolfman, or Geoff Johns."

Eliot gave Hardison a blank look as they wove their way through the hall. Parker took the lead, toting a printed sign with her. Eliot and Hardison trailed in her wake. They made a point of striding right past Patronus's booth. They didn't turn to see if he noticed them.

"No one?" Hardison said. "Nothing? Not even Kurt Busiek? Neil Gaiman?"

"I have a life. I do things, active things. I date women."
"Stan Lee?"

Eliot gave Hardison that one with a wag of his head. "Who hasn't heard of Stan Lee?"

"All right," Hardison said with satisfaction. "You had me worried there, man. ~ Matt Forbeck

It doesn't matter how "successful" each of us is in life. We're all doomed to die. Why can't anyone else see that? ~ Alan Moore

Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen. ~ Alan Moore

If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us. ~ Alan Moore

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. ~ Warren Ellis

For whatever the future holds, one thing is certain ... It just won't be the same. ~ Alan Moore

If you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. ~ Alan Moore