Till We Have Faces Quotes
"No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city."
"Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it."
"A man so offered is said to be Ungit’s husband, and a woman is said to be the bride of Ungit’s son."
"Those gods—the sort of gods you are always thinking about—are all folly and lies of poets."
"Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them."
"Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood."
"Better than going Down Yonder with a daughter’s blood on your hands."
"I see, Master, I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that your own safety was the thing we must work for at all costs."
"It’s only sense that one should die for many. It happens in every battle."
"I don’t want to lie still. Some said it was useless for me to rise, for the King had said that neither of the Princesses should go to the Offering."
"The only thing that did me good was quite different. It was hardly a thought, and very hard to put into words."
"You could see it was a god’s house at once. I don’t mean a temple where a god is worshipped. A god’s House, where he lives."
"But sweat is the kindest creature of the three—far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts."
"I learned then how one can hate those one loves."
"It’s the being mortal—being, how shall I say it? . . . insufficient."
"No one can be sad while they’re using wrist and hand and eye and every muscle of their body."
"Do you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?"
"If it’s all my fancy, how do you think I have lived these many days?"
"The pools of the river as I went down to it to drink seemed to be dark holes in the greyness."
"Would a river flowing in the gods’ secret valley do that, or the clean contrary?"
"When I lifted my head and looked once more into the mist across the water, I saw that which brought my heart into my throat."
"What is the use of a sign which is itself only another riddle?"
"The whole thing was vanished. There was a tiny space of time in which I thought I could see how some swirlings of the mist had looked, for the moment, like towers and walls."
"If they had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain?"
"I began to see, at first very unwillingly, that I might be doomed to live, and even to live an unchanged life, some while longer."
"I went to bed now. See to the sending, Bardia, and then to bed yourself. A good night to you both."
"My mind’s made up. And none of you can think of a better way out of our dangers."
"I resolved that for the two days left to me I’d queen it with the best of them."
"It’s a strange, yet somehow a quiet and steady thing, to look round on earth and grass and the sky and say in one’s heart to each, ‘You are all my enemies now. None of you will ever do me good again.'"
"I think this offer to fight the Prince yourself is foolish and, what’s more, unseemly."
"I shall be Queen, Redival. Your treatment shall be according to your behaviour."
"And now I saw my challenge to the Prince quite differently. Of course he would kill me."
"I had hardly ever before been glad of his going. But I thought, too, how much kinder he was than Psyche."
"I had thought she might scream and wring her hands or faint. But I was deceived."
"There’s something in a man that goes against it."
"There’s a moment when one pause may lose a chance."
"I saw in a flash that if I shrank from this there would at once be less Queen and more Orual in me."
"You know they’re to kill a pig this morning."
"Yet I feel sure my hand would not fail me to stab him."
"You’d have been widowed many a year sooner if I’d not been there."
"It seemed as if the gods had first laughed, and then spat, in my face."
"I had become what the people, and the old Priest, called holy."
"If I were Ungit, I might be the Shadowbrute also."
"Do not do it. You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands."
"The gods work in and out of one another as of us."
"Why, every wheedling, smiling, cat-foot rogue who lures away another man’s wife or slave or dog might say the same."
"You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t thrive."
"How if we were made to be dregs and refuse everywhere and everyway?"
"The Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is."
"Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean?"
"The gods have been accused by you. Now’s their turn."