The Claw Of The Conciliator Quotes
"Such a mighty structure was the Wall that it divided the world as the mere line between their covers does two books."
"Time to wash, time to serve the journeymen, time to chant lessons to myself before Master Palaemon's examination."
"Then I was awake. Country smells—much like the pleasant odors of flower and tree that used to float across the ruined curtain wall from the necropolis."
"By the time I had finished refreshing myself from the bucket of the inn-yard well, the street before the inn was no longer silent, but alive with hooves that splashed through the puddles left by the previous night's rain."
"It never seems to get much closer to us, or much farther off either."
"I will not recount others unless they hold some special interest. If you delight in another's pain and death, you will gain little satisfaction from me."
"The executions were to take place at the very center of the festivities, and a dense crowd had already gathered there."
"I recall the rush of the attack and my own frantic blows, but in retrospect everything seems to have happened in a breath."
"I only knew that there was something far beneath us before which the man-apes, with all the terror of their appearance and their numbers, scattered like sparks before a wind."
"I knew you would die for me, and so I dared to hope that you would have chosen, if you could choose, to suffer for me too."
"My nerves have never, I suppose, been fully sound, tormented as they have always been by a relentless memory."
"No one can be much frightened, certainly, during a period of great and imminent peril—the mind is too much concentrated on the thing itself."
"The coward is a coward, then, because he has brought his fear with him."
"I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it."
"That which makes us different from animals, and alike to the stars, is our ability to give meaning to actions."
"In the end, we are the sum of our choices, and our memories shape those choices."
"The heart of all wisdom is an understanding of one's own ignorance."
"Sometimes, the greatest act of love is no action at all."
"Our greatest battles are those with our own minds."
"We may be able to destroy those things so they can't be flown against us again or be used to harm anyone else."
"A lot of people have died, by the way, because they found they could cut these creatures, and choose to stand their ground doing it until they were surrounded by too many to fend off."
"The speed of any flying thing depends on its wing area."
"They prefer life's heat, though they can sometimes be distracted by a fire of living vegetable matter."
"Whoever sent them is going to give up now, and we might have need of them."
"The world is better without them anyway, as the butcher's wife told him when she cut away his manhood."
"There are beings—and artifacts—against which we batter our intelligence raw, and in the end make peace with reality only by saying, 'It was an apparition, a thing of beauty and horror.'"
"The dead do not rise, nor the years turn back. What has been and is gone does not come again."
"Most of life, so it seems to me, consists of these surrenders."
"Someone must make amends for the evil of Urth, or the New Sun will never come."
"Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times."
"Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character."
"My own case is that I usually sleep without memorable dreams."
"Perhaps it was some other state posing as sleep, as alzabos, when they have eaten of men, pose as men."
"My thoughts were oppressed by worry for Jonas."
"I surrendered myself to my irritation at being unable to sleep."
"Master Palaemon, who had taught us so much, had never taught us how to sleep."
"There is a rack of knives over the table where Brother Aybert slices meat."
"I was wide-awake again, or thought I was, and I did not know why."
"I am the parent of the human race, my child. And you are my child, as she is."
"I haven't thought of a name for what it was yet."
"I'm such a child, Meschia. I don't remember anything until I walked out into the light."
"The seas of the whole world shook with our mourning for you."
"Where have you beheld skin clearer than mine, or redder lips?"
"These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient."
"Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be."
"We are but dreams, and dreams possess no life by their own right."
"For most of the morning we walked through the cane, meeting no one."
"It was the only time since I had received her from Master Palaemon that Terminus Est seemed burdensome to me."
"I cut cane for us, and we chewed it for the sweet juice."
"In a day we reached the end of the cane and emerged onto the edge of the true pampa, the sea of grass."
"These cattle represented a far greater danger to us than the cats did."
"The thought that Jolenta might die was repugnant to me."
"Once, in a macabre mood, I gestured for the birds to join us."
"I told you I don't know nothing. You should ask this man here—he can lead an ox—I almost said a bull—like a dog."
"We understand, but we won't disturb him. We may even be able to help him."
"There was no bedding beyond that on which the sick man lay."
"In the final reckoning there is only love, only that divinity."
"There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden."
"Everyone around here but me is one ignorant eclectic."