In "To Quote a Phrase," I spotlight memorable quotes from comic books.

Today, we look at a brilliant piece of writing by Neil Gaiman from the early issues of his iconic run on Sandman.

The set-up of Sandman (by Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg) was that Morpheus/Dream, the star of the book, had been locked up for almost a century before being released in the first issue. In the second issue, then, he had to find out what had happened to his three powerful talismans since he had been imprisoned, his sand pouch, his Demon's helm and his Dreamstone...

In the third issue of Sandman, Morpheus and John Constantine team up to retrieve the sand pouch...

In the fourth issue, Morpheus travels to hell to retrieve his helmet from the demon who had acquired it over the years. Morpheus is too weak to just TAKE the helmet from Choronzon, the demon who has it, so instead, he has to challenge Choronzon to a contest and Choronzon chooses the game of reality, a battle of wits where they each have to try to come up with something more powerful than the other person's choice.

It is a big to-do among all the demons of hell, as, well, there's not a whole lot of interesting new things going on in hell, ya know?

The battle begins and it slowly but surely increases in intensity...

Until finally, Choronzon believes that he has the top choice and that there is little that Morpheus could think of to beat him and then, well, Morpheus drops HOPE...

And this is too much for Choronzon and he is defeated...

The brilliance of this sequence was one of the early signs that this series was going to be something special. Not that the first three issues weren't good, as they were, but this was a step above. Gaiman, of course, would just keep rising the bar from issue to issue (the Dreamstone is in the possession of the old Justice League enemy, Doctor Destiny, and he uses it in a gruesome one-off issue called "24 Hour Diner")

Okay, folks, if you care to suggest cool comic book quotes that you'd like to see spotlighted here, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com. There's a decent enough chance that if you think the quote in question is super cool than I, too, will find it super cool and feature it here. Not a 100% chance, though, of course. Let's say roughly a 60% chance.