Watchmen (comics)/Quotes

Rorshach's journal, October 12th, 1985

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I've 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."

...now the whole world stands on the brink, staring into bloody hell. All those liberals, and intellectuals and smooth talkers, and suddenly no one can think of anything to say. Beneath me, this awful city, it screams like an abattoir of retarded children, and the night reeks of fornication and bad consciences.

Tonight, a comedian died in New York, somebody knows why. Somebody knows...

—Excerpt from Rorschach's Journal, October 12, 1985

"I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him."

—Rorschach

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

—Captain Metropolis

"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?"

—Rorschach

"I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else."

—Dr. Malcolm Long

"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me."

—Rorschach

Laurie Juspeczyk: "Is that what you are? The most powerful thing in the universe and you're just a puppet following a script?"
Doctor Manhattan: "We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."

"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 precise daughter [...] to distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle. [...] Come, dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg."

—Dr. Manhattan

"I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

—Adrian Veidt

"No. Not even in the face of armageddon. Never compromise."

—Rorschach

Adrian Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.
Dr. Manhattan: "In the end"? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.