"The currents of the ocean pulled at my hair and my clothes like summer breezes. I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever.
“You can’t,” said Lettie. “It would destroy you.” I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, “Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.’ No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points . . .”
-Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“You can’t,” said Lettie. “It would destroy you.” I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, “Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.’ No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points . . .”
-Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane