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Quote List
And the Nonman King cried words that sting: ...for the sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others. COINCIDENCE You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on. HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view. Garroting Deep has sent Caer-Caveral to Morrinmoss. But he cannot claim you. Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction. Less Lust through Less Protein, Eggs, Meat, Beans, Cheese, and Sitting. Sometimes when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you. Increate, it is known to us that those who will perish here are no more evil in your sight than we. Their hands run with blood. Ours also. He is the Shield Anvil. Fener knows grief, so much grief that it is beyond his capacity to withstand it. And so he chooses a human heart. Armoured. A mortal soul, to assume the sorrow of the world. The Shield Anvil. How many miles to Babylon? Nice Monkey! To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I'm going to be dead. Loss is written into the very earth. We are only its most dramatic reminder. The Filthy And Dangerous Vice of Smoking, which Offends the Nose, Deadens the Palate, Causes Ageing of the Skin, and Enforces a Progressive Decrepitude of the Body Entire. Tobacco will Slowly and Surely Kill You. Often I must speak otherwise than I think. This is called diplomacy. When the dead walk, señores, we must stop the killing... or lose the war. Long Live The Changing Things To A More Equitable State While Retaining Due Respect For The Traditions Of Our Forebears And Of Course Not Harming The August Personage Of The Emperor Endeavor. What disguise? This is my lucky shirt. SACRIFICE ZONE: WARNING. The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone. The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value. The best life is the one the gods don't notice. It's a bad smell when sorcerors panic. Think we'd fight to save a piece of cloth on a pole? - Are you expecting someone to poison you? This heated discussion between a violinist and an invisible fairy would have drawn attention in some places. On a corner of East Fourth Street, no one took any notice. The impossible did not bother him unduly. If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how? The vastness of its mad-made architecture disobeyed not only rules of style but, it was said, of physics. It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care. Either of those who attacked a troll was making the last big mistake of its career in any case. Detritus carried a 2,000lb-draw crossbow as a hand weapon. Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. As much as I detest the doorways of Death, Hades' dark gates, so do I detest a man who says one thing with his mouth but hides another in his heart. Surrender now, and we'll spare your goddesses' lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans. No, time moves in one direction only, and it cannot be turned back. I am here and I am now, and tomorrow will be a new day in my life. Perhaps it is fortunate that most heroes who die for their people cannot come back to see what the people do with that hard-bought life and freedom. I knew why we feared this Jaghut Tyrant. Because he became human, he became like us; he enslaved, he destroyed, and he did it better than we could. - Do all Imass think about futility? We shall be our own witness, and that will be enough. It must be enough. It must ever be enough. When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend. Minions! FIND my information and deliver it, post haste Our prayer was simple - to raze Ilium's walls to its roots, kill its heroes, rape its women, enslave its people. Is that too much to ask? Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. Never send a human to do a machine's job. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure. Anyway, I have to admit I've never understood why people like the Pelerines always think ordinary people have to have their lust purified. In my experience, they control it well enough by themselves, and just about every day, too. You must forgive me, but I don't find it easy to talk of professional virgins to a man who's just seen me naked. Though under other circumstances it might be different. In our commercial society, one may set one's price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason. This is my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get it too. Save the universe! You should have thought of that before you started your vendetta against me! You may go, after I have killed you. See your enemies content and your lovers melancholy. All men are greater than dead men. It is far better to outwit Truth than to apprehend it. Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing. One can look into the future, or one can look at the future. The latter is by far the more instructive. The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men. If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything. What is the meaning of a deluded life? Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human. The proposition "I am the centre" need never be uttered. It is the assumption upon which all certainty and all doubt turns. Rain would be good, too. Rain made you feel blue, and it was feeling blue that brought the best songs. We make music to live, indeed, but we also make music because doing so is most truly to live. It is not work to play among friends, Rovigo. Father does not believe him, but purchased Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior for him nonetheless, because a Seeing Eye Bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness. I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story. I mount the autobus for an hour to work all day doing things I hate. ...To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield... Curiouser and curiouser! Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life! It sets such a bad precedent when you start letting the world come to an end every week or so. It seems to erode the confidence people have in their government for some reason. Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man. Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, Sorceress, you will have outrun your soul. When it finds you again it will kill you. Raising the flag and singing the anthem, Hepplewhite, are, while somewhat suspicious, not themselves acts of treason. All beliefs are too subtle. Deceived men always think themselves certain, just as they always think themselves free. This is simply what it means to be deceived. Metaphor is the anchor of belief. Nonmen, Sranc and Men: Ignorance is trust. Hell is repetition. Welcome to maturity and experience. You don't feel older, you just know what you're doing this time. He kept his promises. All of them. That's supposed to be a good thing, but it's really the shits. It makes a bastard like me feel like he has to do the same. ...and that revelation murdered all that I once did know. Where once I asked of the God, "Who are you?" now I ask, "Who am I?" People think it's a failure to live alone, but it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else. Hopes are such brittle things, and they can hurt you when they break. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! Yes, depart a lot at this time and cut the approaching any more, or we fire arrows at the tops of your heads and make castanets out of your testicles already! Ha ha haaa ha! And now, remain gone, illegitimate-faced bugger-folk! There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived. Is an honourable cause worth anything these days? Does it matter that we've borrowed it? We fight as well as any man. We die alongside them. Mercenaries of the spirit. And even that is a coin we scarely value. The history is done, Baruk, and the Tiste Andii point of view is one of disinterest, stoicism, and quiet, empty despair. Are these gifts to the world worthy of preservation? I think not. A day with no noon, Good luck with the bloke in the metal cigar case, miss. How does one learn innocence? How does one teach ignorance? For to be them is to know them not. And yet they are the immovable point from which the compass of life swings, the measure of all crime and compassion,the rule of all wisdom and folly. Life consists of nothing but exceptions. All of us have to struggle, not just against the Darkness, but against the Light. Because sometimes it blinds us. Tourists are the most terrible breed of people. But we don't believe in any gods, or in God. We are our own gods, and our own demons. - Crocodiles aren't so bad. At least you don't have to feed them. I've noticed that irony is something better appreciated from a great distance of either miles or years, or both, and best appreciated when it's happening to someone else. Yet there may be a light beyond the darkness; and if so, I would have you see and be glad. Poussiere, je rentre dans la poussiere. La vie est pleine d'humiliations et de douleurs; tous les fils qui la rattachent au bonheur se rompent tour a tour dans la main de l'homme, sourtout les fils d'or. - You know, Plan B doesn't have to automatically be twice as much explosive as Plan A. The wonders latent in the tiniest of insects are beyond even my understanding, my son. Wait. You must be patient. Yes, you can conduct a war with goats. Always among the first questions of thy kind... what is it and how can I kill it? I'm so quotable. Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans. And now it seems I am to get another sword. From having no sword at all, suddenly I have two special ones! I don't see what all this has to do with being a king. It must be a Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays. Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it. Am I busy? Well, I've just got all these bulldozers and things to lie in front of because they'll knock my house down if I don't, but other than that ... well, no not especially, why? - We have a thing on Earth... It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard. Look, I'm a bit upset about that. Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out. Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of. Look, would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now? It's uphill work. The only word they know is grunt and they can't spell it. Maybe, just maybe my boys can do it. Yeah, and maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot. Sure I could have stayed in the past. I could have even been king, but in my own way I am king. Hail to the king, baby. We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw... does that sound fine to you? Good... bad... I'm the guy with the gun. You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that. The universe demands of us a sense of irony. There'll be no tomorrow! I have a presentiment of doom upon me. And I fear it shall come to us with barbecue sauce. People ain't like you think, Patera. Maybe you studied a long time, but there's a lot that you don't know. You're working for the gods, right? Let them get you out. Todo se sabe (Everything is known) You are a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter. nossy is a girl?! Well, Brother William, have you already become accustomed to this den of madmen? How many are the miracles, which even the angels, which are limitless, cannot contain. I have loved human beings...their wonderment, their constant searching, their changes, contradictions. Curiosity. Even their failures, since from failure to failure they have learned to ascend to a higher plane. You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say. We're making progress. Is anyone gonna eat that last steak? I'm Bad Ash. And you're good Ash. You're a goody little two shoes. You're goody little two shoes...goody little two shoes... You can search and search, on a quest, and in the end you may never get there at all. Brilliant, Piter! I'm so glad I didn't execute you all those times you were so annoying. According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, mainly because, no matter how cool, stylish, composed, unflappable, manly, or defiant you are, at the end of the day you're also dead. Not only are there no happy endings - there aren't even any endings. It takes nearly a minute to fall from this height. And despite what you may have heard, you're likely to stay conscious all the way down. Thoughts like that keep me warm at night. It was tough work, carrying two hundred pounds of sociopath to the top of Gotham Towers - the highest spot in the city. The scream alone is worth it. Yes, I know it is not the truth, but in a great story you can change little truths to make the bigger truth reveal itself. Why? Because the supreme good is the freedom to do good or evil, and, to give his children the supreme good, God must accept the fact that some of them will make bad use of it. When a warrior enters a city, all religion is irrelevant. I Baudolino son of Gagliaudo of the Aulari with a head that looks like a lion halleluia gratias to the Allmighty may he forgive me Good Lord Jesus, it's true: you're Ghini! Weren't you the one who could sell anything, even the dung of your goats, like that time when you passed some off on a pilgrim as the ashes of San Baudolino? If the victorious army had to eat the fallen, war would become much less attractive. He's stupefying them with pomposity. You son of a pig. Make your enemies by choice, not by accident. Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them? Oh, so just cause a robot wants to kill humans, that makes him a radical. I'm a conscientious objector... In other words, a coward. I'm Bender baby, please insert liquor! Let's face it, comedy is a dead art form. Now tragedy, ha ha ha, that's funny. You may need to metaphorically make a deal with the devil. By devil I mean robot devil and by metaphorically I mean get your coat. El miedo mata la mente. El miedo es la pequeña muerte que conduce a la destrucción total. Afrontaré mi miedo. Permitiré que pase sobre mí y a través de mí. Y cuando haya pasado, giraré mi ojo interior para escrutar su camino. Give black rabbit meat a good soaking, bring it to boil seven times, set it in the sun for a week or two, then steam it in the oven - and it won't kill you. The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists. The skeleton wears muscle, muscle wears skin, skin wears clothing. A face is a mask made of skin; an eye is a marble connected to the brain. I have eaten strange flesh, and I have borne strange fruit. You've never learned to obey orders, have you? It's me, me, me all the time. "Oh, I've got a funny feeling in my toe, so we must all go and stand on our heads!" Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire with the kettle just beginning to sing! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door... You step into the Road and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. What have I got in my pockets? I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. This is me at my most masochistic. Now, Kiddo, I'd like to believe that you're aware enough even now to know there's nothing sadistic in my actions, maybe towards those other jokers, but not you. Do you find me sadistic? I'll never forget the night he arrived on horseback with a sword at his side and had me trace a missing compost heap for him. One bite will let you understand everything. Two bites would let you understand more than everything, and more than everything is too much. Who knows what the dead are wishing? Bhojujik mo qunquc, as my people say. 'If the bears do not eat you, it is home.' Financial acumen has been known to win the favours of many a sweet young body. I ain't got time to bleed. I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage. I feel that if we had wanted people to fly, we would have given them wings. - Never let it be said the gods are unjust. The willow knows what the storm does not: the power to endure harm outlives the power to inflict it. Compassion existed when and only when one could step outside oneself, to suddenly see the bars from inside the cage. Black is so monotonous that you can forget about it, but red - you'd always be thinking, "Why, look at that. That hill is red. That evil force of doom trying to destroy me certainly has style." Gentlemen, something has broken holes in the structure of time... Why didn't you tell me your rates before you pulled me out of the river? I could have told you then that I can't afford them, and you could have gone on and looked for a more affluent person to rescue. Well, that particular expression you're wearing is almost alarming. I'd be intimidated. If I weren't, you know, incomparably more powerful than you. Even Brother Nhumrod would have to agree that when it came to rampant eroticism, you could do a lot better than a one-eyed tortoise. You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look. That girl deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die... but then again, so does she. Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer. Pleasure and freedom are ours! We despise the filthy materialists and their thinking machines who enslave us with their utopia! Where is true humanity in that? Where is pain and death and suffering? How dare you be so selfish, so self-repressed? Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival. I'm the amazing Cain. If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends. If you didn't, I trust you'll all get throat cancer and die without ever again uttering another word. The rest of my plan went pretty much the way most of my plans do: just fine, right up to the point where it spectacularly exploded. Your life only looks like fate when you see it in reverse. To hell with the next world. Let's be immortal in this one. We're gonna die anyway. Let's do it right. He that lives by the sword shall die by my knife. That's prophecy, if you like. People used to say the best revenge is living well. Dying well is almost as good. That's what stories are; ways of pretending that things happen for a reason. If dying were anything special, they wouldn't let everybody do it. That was so bad I think you gave me cancer. I've got a month or so in which to turn two ignorant straight-legged fumble-thumb landlubbers into something resembling phony sea-officers. All gods as my witness, sirs, I suspect this is all gonna end in screaming and drowning. They'll probably taste a bit like chicken. Everything does, if you're hungry enough. If you sow dragon's teeth, you should get dragons. Not fighting skeletons. What did it say on the packet? I have survived - I exist! - at least as a memory. At least as a nightmare. If your God is everywhere, if He is always watching, why should your people make houses to go to worship Him? Faced with an all-seeing, everywhere-being God, I would think what is needed is a place to hide. Your gift to me was words - a language. But it was a poison fruit, that naming of things, for with language I learned lies. Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead. When anyone tells you that habits die hard, Locke, they're lying - it seems they never die at all. I'm disinclined to aquiesce to your request. Means "no." The gods give us the fear of death so that we won't squander their gifts too lightly - so that we will use what is given us to the fullest. Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. I've got a jar of dirt! But... why is the rum gone?! Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes. In the game of chess you can never let your adversary see your pieces. Stop exploding, you cowards! I am the man with no name, Zapp Brannigan at your service. Wow, one day a man has everything... Then the following day he blows up a $40 billion space station, and the next day he has nothing. It really makes you think. - What the hell do you know? Do you know that when I first arrived here, I actually tried to arrest the head of the thieves guild for stealing? Maybe I'm just tall for my height. We can rebuild him. We have the pottery An appointment is an engagement to see someone, while a morningstar is a large lump of metal used for viciously crushing skulls. It is important not to confuse the two. The difference between the strong emperor and the weak is simply this: the former makes the world his arena, while the latter makes it his harem. How they loved to promise heads, these men who would be king. All your base are belong to us! I'm just sitting here, waiting to hear this man tell me he's an outer space alien. Meanwhile, everybody's talking about sandwiches! Sandwiches, for God's sake! The sky is a bright gray bowl, crossed with raveled contrails, and as she presses the button to announce herself at Blue Ant, she wishes she'd brought her sunglasses. He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose,the mouth a left slash. She's a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult. The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Jacques Cousteau said that jet lag was his favorite drug. Some very basic computational module instantly had completed the simplest of equations: if boyfriend sleeps with gun, Cayce does not share bed, or bod, with (now abruptly former) boyfriend. Hotmail downloads four messages, none of which she feels like opening. Her mother, three spam. The penis enlarger is still after her, twice, and Increase Your Breast Size Dramatically. Damien's theory of Jet Lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know. In the game of thrones, you win or die. Love is a poison, Sansa. A sweet poison, but it will kill you all the same. Do you have any notion what happens when a city is sacked, Sansa? No, you wouldn't, would you? All you know of life you learned from singers, and there's such a dearth of good sacking songs. People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the only ones worth having for your friends. Anything that must be done, can be done. Only about a kiloton each. Hardly big enough to set off decent crust waves, really. They were really only teeny little A-bombs, honest! Please if you get a chance put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard. Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it? Do not defy me, mortal! It is an honour to feed a god! There was no use denying it. Somehow, people could tell if you were a dwarf just by looking at you. I don't blow everything up, sir. Some just melts. Never give the idle gods anything to think about. To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived... The hors d'oeuvres were chived cremat - something like grass on a dog turd on a biscuit as hard as a dinner plate. I was sure he hadn't read Miscreants and Morons - A Philosophical Solution, since he had not yet committed suicide. Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurence....... Some events are not remembered - they are relived. You're wondering why I'm wearing all this armor. It's because Kruppe's in charge. When Kruppe's in charge I don't feel safe unless I'm prepared for war. Today's exercise is called "melt away into the countryside." It has already commenced, and you are already doing a miserable job of it, being bunched together in plain view! A reputation is ever the plaything of history. Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his. Ever the hard-hearted avoid the heat of desperate men. For the bonfires of the weak crack the most stone. Kings never lie. They demand the world be mistaken. The strongest walls will not hold if the hearts inside are weak. The details were always different, in the lives of other people. The stories were always the same. And now he realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps. Nobody steals books but your friends. I think I see a monster off to port. If he has any brains, he'll aim for the bottom... He just did. Talk is cheap. Whiskey costs money. I sometimes think of us as a gang of mean little old ladies in a combination rest home and obstacle course. I used her, yes, but she knew it not. Can the same be said for you? Tell me, is knowing you're being used better than not knowing? Etiquette is a set of rules people use so they can be rude to each other in public. I'm Thomas Covenant, for God's sake. I've saved the Land twice. And I sure as hell didn't get myself killed because I like being dead. This is fun. Me, robbing my own treasury. If I catch myself I can have myself flung into the snake pit. Let's kill him, if only to put him out of our misery. I am Crone, eldest of the Moon's Great Ravens, whose eyes have looked upon a thousand years of human folly. Hence my tattered coat and broken beak as evidence of your indiscriminate destruction. I am but a winged witness to your eternal madness. - All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. Magic's creepy. I'm going to bed. Stay. Rule. And be a Queen. Dragons die. But so do dragonslayers. My brothers have my measure when it comes to fighting and dancing and thinking and reading books, but none of them is half my equal at lying insensible in the mud. Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are. If you grow up with any kind of sense - which you sometimes make me doubt - you will very likely reach your own conclusions. They will probably be wrong... However, since they will be yours, you will feel a little more satisfied with them. Was there a category of insurance for having your boat stolen by an undead sorcerer while the owner was away attending a demon-inspired posse? If so, the rate must be interesting. Please explain to me the scientific nature of "the whammy." On an arbitrary numerical scale of conversational oddness, ranging from one to ten, with ten being the oddest conversation I've ever had, and seven being the oddest conversation I have in a typical day, this rates no better than five. I have never been to Spain, Sir Richard, and so the only way I know that they burn books is because of the vast number of books that have been published on the subject. Truth! There is no such thing. There are only signals in your brain. Everything: sensations, memory, love, hate, abstract philosophy, gross physical lusts. It's nothing. I see your Schwartz is as big as mine. Now let's see how well you handle it. I'm surrounded by Assholes! Keep firing, Assholes! Get back here, you fat bearded bitch! No...I am your father. Once I was but a learner; now I am the master. And for yet another moment, he reflected on the fact that, to all intents and purposes, he lived in a cosmos where God's name was Honest John. If human beings never dreamed higher than money, they wouldn't be worth saving. EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS, STAYS HAPPENED. You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane! RUINED? MY HARVEST? BUGGER THAT. I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE. You get what anyone gets - you get a lifetime. DON'T PUT TOO MUCH TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. Don't apples taste great? I mean the way they taste. And the texture. And the way when you chew them they kind of crunch and the juice runs out into your mouth. DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH. Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus? LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN? YOU SEE, YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE, WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR-VIMES EXPERIENCE. DON'T MIND ME. CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING. I HAVE A BOOK. I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level. All true stories end in death. Umm... Sometimes I forget what I was going to say. Sometimes I remember things everyone else has forgotten for ever and ever. Does that ever happen to you? What's a false move? Is it very different from a real one? When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do. I'm cold. I hate being nowhere. Let's go somewhere instead. You know the best thing about airplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay I think you're very nice. I think twinkle's a nice word. So's viridian. I met a lady once who had an imaginary fish. I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it. I like the way colors taste. Except I don't like crimsons...or turquoises...especially when they put their heads into their shells and won't play and when you break their shells to let them out they die... Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one’s ever eaten before? Like chicken and telephone ice cream? I have lost a finger. But not an important one. If I had! If you had! Such words and ifs are vain. It has gone into the Shadow, and only time will show what doom awaits it, and us. You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! Help! Help! I'm being repressed! I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away! Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Soon they'll be breeding us like cattle! You've got to warn everyone and tell them! Soylent green is made of people! You've got to tell them! Soylent green is people! Dis is der Riot Act. You know what dat means? It means if'n I reads it out and youse don't disb... disp... go away, der Watch can use deadly force, you unnerstand? Now we sing dis stupid song! She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross. Wicked wicked Zoot. She is a bad person and she must pay the penalty. And here in Castle Anthrax, we have but one punishment. You must tie her down on a bed, and spank her. Come! Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection. OK, I don't like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually realize that this is a difficult and distressing time for you. Luckily you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as "impossible" in my dictionary. In fact, everything between "herring" and "marmalade" appears to be missing. Wonderful. I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards. It's our genes, not our names, that make us whatever we are. They say time is the fire in which we burn. Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expect? Do you know the difference between a wildling who's a friend to the Watch and one who's not? Our enemies leave our bodies for the crows and the wolves. Our friends bury us in secret graves. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breath a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to. I suppose you could call them men, yes. Two legs, two arms, a head each. If we could have our way, no man would have to go roving or draw blood. But women did not make the world. All of you are torturers in one way or another. The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this. But the quantities are the same, we change only their proportion here or there. She's the sort of woman who's good at making puzzles for other people, but not at solving ones she didn't make herself. Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. I love deadlines. I love the "whoosh" sound they make as they go past. All we common people have the common sense to realize that genius, like the clap, is a social disease, and we take action accordingly. We put all our geniuses in one kind or another of isolation ward, to escape being infected. A sound magician is a mighty god. It's just an eyeball - plenty more where that one came from. It hasn't got a soul - it's only got an eyeball. But captain, to obey - just like that - for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do. The Mamba du Mal is safe in its cage. It must have gotten out, bitten Dr. Montgomery, and locked itself up again. We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings. I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us... All we ever see of stars is their old photographs. He's worse than dead! Simon, there are more things you don't know than there are things I do know. I despair of the imbalance. . . . And you would certainly not say: 'Rachel, I can't do my chores because Morgenes and I are plotting treason,' - would you? A new day, Baldanders! Still alive! Time to eat and defecate and make love - all that! Up now, or we'll never get home. The gift of death? Oh, no! No, my dear, you've had that all your life. So has he. We wouldn't pretend to give you what is already yours. The gift we offer is beauty, with the fame and wealth that derive from it. There are few advantages, I'll tell you, that profit a man more than humor. Humor will draw a crowd. Humor will clam a mob or reassure a nursery school. Humor will get you on and get you off, and pull in asimis like a magnet. I love reading novels. You can understand them without thinking too much. I simply wish to know, for practical reasons, whether you are being stalked by any more giant murderous harpooneers. Upon my word, there is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what every body does all the time. Confident, cocky, lazy, dead. Sometimes we can choose the path we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all. The price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted. It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit and the emperor remains an emperor. For Men, no circle is ever closed. We walk ever in spirals. The lesson of history is that no-one learns. Perhaps victory is not achieved by overcoming that enemy, but by joining it, becoming one with it. Who needs temples and priests to chain and guide the expression of loss and dismay - when all is sacred? We totter on edges seen and unseen. We are reduced, yet defiant. We've lost the meaning of time. Endless motion broken only by its dulled absence Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand here still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living. A spirit's game is a man's nightmare. Well, let's hope they take their play seriously. Victory tastes sweetest in the absence of haunting memories. It's bad form to spoil a man's surprise, just because your spies are efficient. Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? The way I think of it is this: when you've done all the things worth doing, you're forced to start on the things that aren't. If there's one thing idiots understand, it's injustice to them. I don't mean to hurt your feelings by asking, but is Assistant Pig-Keeper the kind of work that calls for a great deal of intelligence? Duty measures the distance between the animal and the divine. What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays. Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Ni los piratas chinos, ni el barco pintado de blanco del Instituto Rockefeller la tocan (Neither the Chinese pirates, nor the spotted white Rockefeller Institute target ship touch it) You know, people are notoriously bad at discerning what it is they really want. - Faith in Hell? You sure you belong here, girl? We never know what we mean. We act it out, moment to moment. We never know what we mean until it's too late. In memory of Travis Bohannon, a county boy from Florence, Texas, who gave his life to save his family from fire. Not all heroes are in books. - Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would be if they had cremated Jesus? Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. History comforts the dull-witted. Remember, the enemy's gate is down. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. We never wanted to rule the world. Really, now, all we want is to be left alone. Still, with all their years of conquest, perhaps these Nabban folks have forgotten sometimes you have to fight for that, too. Death! Ride to ruin and the world's ending! To health? It may be so. At least while there is an empty saddle of some fallen Rider that I can fill, and there are deeds to do. But to hope? I do not know. I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun, and behold! the Shadow has departed! Do you think darkness is coming? Darkness Unescapable? That bastard! I wouldn't trust him to empty chamber pots. One day I'd find a piranha in mine. You have lived in your dreams so long you've lost sight of the world. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song. That which appears evil need not have been so from the beginning, and need not remain so until the end. Some people admire them, and some people nearly worship them; but nobody likes them, and from what I've seen of them today, they don't even like each other. Captain, look over here... AAAAAGH!!! You are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence. Over hill, over dale, Is all the world a war of good and evil? Have you not thought it might be something more? There is only one thing worse than arguing with a drunk, and that's arguing with a drunk who's right. "Then farewell!" said Faramir. "But if I should return, think better of me!" No one gives a shit about a fat man named Antoyne. "You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could. Get out! And take your sunshine, your Jacuzzi, and your bedroom with you! As your priest, I will warn you again about the use of profanity. As your commanding officer, I order you to come up with as many surprises as you can to kill that spiked son of a bitch. Deception and misdirection are our tools. We don't believe in hard work when a false face and a good line of bullshit can do so much more. One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere you dig. It is not theft. It is archaeology. Makes no difference. Not now. We're still dancing in the corner of a god's eye, but it's only for show. We're dead, for all our twitching about. To speak plainly is a true talent; to bury beneath obfuscation is a poet's calling these days Anybody want a peanut? Two things never mix: one is enchantments and the other is meddling with them. Ah, the truth of it is, the woman makes me shudder. Since the day she threw me into her dungeon, I've noticed something unfriendly about her. Planting mines ain't gonna be easy, so we do it in front of everyone's nose. Road repair. So long, and thanks for all the fish. I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper. Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes. Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have toward animals. The man who becomes most efficiently vicious first is most likely to be the man left standing. I had learned to be that man. It was a weapon similar to - no, it wasn't. Actually it was - no, it wasn't that either. It was closer to ... almost a ... rather it was, sort of a - lance, that's it! A lance! And it was quite good against dragons. No, he was not dying, but teeth lengthen The child is a Groan. An authentic male Groan. Challenge to Change! No Change, Rottcodd. no Change! Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. Come and join us, I'm Ford, this is Arthur. We were just about to do nothing at all for a while but it can wait. My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefore excused from saving the universe. We would love to stay and help, only we're not going to. We have to go and save the Universe, you see, and if that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right. - It's unpleasantly like being drunk. Sounds like a bad time, with luck I'll be drunk enough not to notice. What the hell... you're only young once. You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear. It is what you don't expect that most needs looking for. Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways. I suffer from attention surplus disorder. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? Does it see into me? Clearly? Or darkly? War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for? It's a certainy, but it just might work. That's what I tell myself. I say, "Fred, whatever happens, you're brighter than Detritus." But then I say, "Fred - so's yeast." How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back. There are some things that time can not mend. Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold. They cannot conquer forever! Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no. Dear Horse God, I know I don't usually pray to you. Sometimes I doubt you even exist, but if you're willing to grant me luck... please... stamp your hoof once. All of life can be broken down into moments of transition and moments of revelation. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. They (fairy tales) make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. Well, here at last... comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil. A king will have his way in his own hall, be it folly or wisdom. The Darkness has come. There will be no dawn. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. "What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!" said Gandalf. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won't be good till I move off!" What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on? Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Fool of a Took! This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking-party. Throw yourself in next time, and then you will be no further nuisance. Now be quiet! You cannot pass! Death and dying makes us into children once again, in truth,one last time,there in our final wailing cries. More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children,far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armor of adulthood. But you miss a more subtle truth. I can examine myself, my every feeling, until the Abyss swallows the world, yet come no closer to mastery of those emotions within me. For they are not static things; nor are they immune to the outside world. Hood's breath, man, can't you find another colour of cloth? This perverse love of green must surely be curable. I've got so many dog diseases I'm only alive 'cos the little buggers are too busy fighting among 'emselves. I mean, I've even got Licky End, and you only get that if you're a pregnant sheep. Sometimes you men are like lizards, sunning on the stones of a crumbling house, thinking: "what a nice basking spot someone build for me." Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape! Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers. He had this small bit of architecture that he wanted to get rid of. Nothing major, nothing dangerous. Just a bottomless shaft that he didn't want to deal with. His undead minions kept falling in. We always arise from our own ashes. Always. I can't quite swing the omniscience business, and I'm still working on omnipotence. You believed then that you were hated, and did not know how much you were loved. The seas of the whole world shook with our mourning for you, and the waves wept salt tears and threw themselves despairing upon the rocks. There can't be a toad in every book. All that live cling to life. Council is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Things involving the computer fill me with a childlike terror. Now, if it were a nice ogre or some such, I'd be more in my element. And I assure you there was a mark on this door... Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward, that's how it is usually read. I'd put a curse of stupidity on you if I could improve on nature. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it forever! Apparently, the Fates were not so unsubtle as to deal him another blow just yet. He knew they didn't operate that way. They always let you hope for a while longer, then strung it out before they really let you have it. It is the difference in knowledge that commands respect. This is why the true test of every student lies in the humiliation of his master. Dragons play no games. Come in, then, you and your two Others. I greet you as guests and so will not crush the life from you and devour your souls with peals of laughter. No, instead, I will make some tea. Tar and Canker spread like legs / City wonders where her Lover went / Cos now she's being Ravished blind / by the Prick that is the Government! Nanny Ogg, on the other hand, was enthusiastically downing her third drink and...was well along that path which would probably end up with her usual dancing on the table, showing her petticoats and singing "The Hedgehog Cannot Be Buggered" Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact. I ATEN'T DEAD Mothers do that, you know, when you steal their eggs. They take it personally. Especially when the mother is a monster-sized brain with yellow eyes and dozens of hands. Well, I'm just as happy. It would have been the end of the Eighteenth; in another watch we'd have been killing each other for the money. Dear man, I am a toad. While you are an artist. And for my fortune in the distinction, I daily thank every god that is and every god that ever was. - Why a spoon, cousin, why not an axe? You describe people as crazy - you say, that Jack, he's crazy - and it doesn't mean anything until you see them really, truly, going crazy. Elm, she's a woman. I'm just the male of the species. I couldn't convince her that the sun rises in the east if she preferred it to rise in the west. I believe the mindset which demands sacrifice is essentially tragic in its type of nobility. Tragedy finds glory in losing bravely, but loss is still the outcome. Comedy finds glory in a happy victory. I prefer comedy. Have you seen a split cranium, growing flowers like a window box? I saw that mere hours ago. The old bulldog pursues me as ardently as ever. He's made me worth a fortune. If only one could buy shares in oneself, I could be a rich man. We hate to be caught without contingency plans. I plan to ripen into an old rake. My pastimes will consist of getting schoolgirls into trouble, fighting duels with irate fathers and brothers, and giving witty oratories in the courthouse. Priest, you wish to corrupt my heart; to violate and ruin my essential nature. In certain ways I'm still a dutiful son of my land. Hate? Nothing in the world. I'm quite fond of it. And were I to believe in god, I'd admire his cruel beasts, his earthquakes and villainy, as much as I'd admire him for his haphazard gentleness. But I would not love him. Four times you sinned with her? That's hardly a sin; more like a miracle, for a man of your age. I only hope such sins will warm the nights of my autumn years. I have no ambition to be anything more than what I am. You can decide whether that's a sign of vanity. Whatever the case, you'll have to lure me with something more attractive than the opportunity to become a simpleton. I begin to see how you sell your cult to the gullible. A life without design? A heart lacking hope, love or honour? Take on deity, apply according to directions and leave to set. Guaranteed to fill any gap with cheap yet resilient lies. I might be willing to believe that a god is indeed at work, carrying out a divine plan of destroying the meek. I might even approve of him, although I wouldn't care to meet him alone in a dark alley. Interesting. But, as I think you're mad, I can't believe you. But if we're to talk of reason, no doubt you can explain why your god has given us great powers of reasoning with which to fail to comprehend him. It seems either perverse or very careless on his part. I doubt I'd really enjoy paradise, anyway. And as for you, you'd hate it. So much of your god's breast, but so little of any others, if your literature is to be believed. If I were at all inclined towards religion, I'd say it's less important that we believe in any god than that somewhere there's a god who believes in us. Music brings me pleasure, but so does strangling the breath out of an opponent, or putting my sword through him. If one joy is sacred, why not the other? But I can't very well let you go unpunished, can I? I am a very moral man, you see. My own crimes have sharpened my sense of ethics to a quite unprecedented degree. I am not cruel. Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen. Ah, well, people can be a bit stupid abou' their pets. No villain comes in black, screaming obscenities. All evil has children, homes, regard for self, fear of enemies. You know that I have the greatest possible enthusiasm for this mission. What is a government but an institutionalized method of making sure somebody else does all the work? What vengeance is this? That he should slumber while I endure? Blood douses no hatred, cleanses no sin. Like seed, it spills of its own volition, and leaves naught but sorrow in its wake. I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf, Never tell me the odds. You know, the Millenium Falcon has reclining seats. *wink* I thought... they smelled bad on the outside. Then I'll see you in hell. Laugh it up, fuzz-ball. I've got enough problems without adding a sentient hallucination to the mix. Nine out of ten stand-up comedians recommend laughter in the face of intense stupidity. Insurance in Chicago is expensive enough without adding in a petulant new diety tearing up the real estate. Discretion is the better part of not getting exsanguinated. Let's go. In case of emergency, break laws of physics. There's wrong, and there's wrong, and there's this. I can tell you with no ego that this is my finest blade. If, on your journey, you should encounter God... God will be cut. Cults feed upon one another, lass. Whole myths are co-opted to fuel the faith. Hah! Diomedes - made you run! You coward! You girly girl! Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have gathered in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom. Absolute corruption has its perks. A Xandian savage who would actually die to preserve his honor. That is what makes my life easy - all these fools willing to die for honor. You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony - who tells the last story. You are armless, sir. Not to mention dead. What a strange outcome. Who would have guessed it? That's not a cigar! Uh... and it's not mine. Jamaicans have other interests! Which is why the limbo team got detained at the airport. I'm calling the police! Right after I flush some things. Stir yourself with desire, lass! You've been consorting with the undead and the withered for far too long! Grasp the spear with both hands, I always say! She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, captain, for the universe is leaving us behind. Dont mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start. +++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++ What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul. To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due. Hodor! I have an IQ of 6000... the same IQ as 6000 P.E. teachers. Our biggest enemy is going space crazy through loneliness. The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes. I have misplaced my pants. You two are worse than advocates. And you don't want to know what I do with the souls of advocates. Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same after that. I've tackled a lot of tough problems in my life, but I can't remember a single time I said to myself, You could fix this if you just had a few alternate realities. I may be getting old, but brother, never test the dude in the big yellow boots. Time is an eternity that stutters. I have seen a wonder tonight, but it was something I'd sooner not have seen, and I can't believe the gods smile on such things. Most histories are written by the winners of conflicts, but those written by the losers - if they survive - are often more interesting. It should be obvious, Mappo. We must take on this perilous quest. We must find Iskaral Pust's broom. We approach comprehension - I am certain of that. Insanity depended on your point of view, and if it was the view through your own underpants then everythink looked fine. For someone so known not to give a damn, you're risking a lot for this. You want to be careful, people might think you ain't what you like to think. Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery. Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane - at least, I thought so at the time. Of course I'm talking about a military strike. I don't think reasoned argument is going to work against a force that dismantles three of your planets without even saying "please" first. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. - Where did we put the wheelbarrow the albino had? You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means. A hidden door? How delightful. How sinister. How very appropriate. ...though he consorts with man, woman, and child, though he lays with beasts and makes a mockery of his seed, never shall he be as licentious as the philosopher, who lays with all things imaginable. That which is imagined need never be lost. Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi One Ring to rule them all, You, as Actors, have a precisely defined role, irrespective of whether you swing a blade or throw a lightning bolt, joust or heal the sick. It is purely and simply this: Your function in society is to risk your life in interesting ways. Well, I've aready killed a god today. If I'd known this was going to be a day for killing gods, I might have paced myself better. My mind's a cauldron, and all these dreams are bubbling over. By... Jabber's... arse... The pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion. Godshit, Lin! Not everything I say is about fear of discovery! Having money in the family was like cigarettes - the trouble with both was that they were always there for you. I thought life was supposed to be a caberet. Now you're telling me it's an orgasm? The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies. A life given for a life taken. Iskaral Pust is anything but insane, as you well know. Wood! No, of course not. But dung, oh yes, plenty of dung. I am reminded of my own melodramatic gestures when I but toddled about in my Aunt Tulla's yard. Bullying the chickens when they objected to the straw hats I had spent hours weaving. Incapable of appreciating the intricate plans I devised. No mule can match wits with me. Oh yes, many have tried, and almost all have failed! The Reve held a plea for restraint, and insisted the glory to be found was not to be a blind one, rather a glory born of solemn, clear-eyed regard. Within limitless reality resided the promise of redemption. 'The void of lost faith is filled with your swollen self.' One does not yield, one replaces. Faith with doubt, scepticism, denial. I have yielded nothing. I have no horde of words crowding my inner defences. Indeed, I am diminished into silence. Yet, I must not surrender. Gods, hear me! I may not be yours. But your fallen children, they are mine. Witness, then, what lies behind my cold face. Witness! The Reve of Fener voiced the truth of war. It spoke true of the cruelty that humanity was capable of unleashing upon its own kind. War was played like a game by those who led others; played in an illusory arena of calm reason. A perspicacious enquiry, sir, one that leads to certain challenges to previously held assumptions for all concerned. You are the mender of broken lives. Without you, death is senseless, and the denial of meaning is the world's greatest crime to its own children. Hold, Itkovian...hold fast - I comprehend you, now, Rath'Fener, but comprehension is not synonymous with absolution. The justice that is your punishment does not waver. Thus, you were made to know pain. We are all pushed into a world of madness, yet it must now fall to each of us to pull back from this Abyss, to drag ourselves free of the descending spiral. From horror, grief must be fashioned, and from grief, compassion. There was, beneath the cold faces of gods, warmth. Yet it was sorrow in darkness, for it was not the gods themselves who were unfathomable. It was mortals. As for the gods - they simply paid. I am the Shield Anvil. I am Fener's grief. I am the world's grief. And I will hold. I will hold it all, for we are not yet done. No-one is to be denied their grief, sir, not even you. Soldiers are issued armour for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece. I can do things no one else can do. If when you die you get a choice between pie heaven and regular heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick but if not mmmboy! A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call up the guy and hold the burning fuse to the phone. "Hear that?" you say. "That's dynamite, baby." I owe an 'umble apology to every Scotsman I've ever met, for it isn't true, after all, that their music is the most despicable in the world.
We've been presented - assuming I am reading the signs correctly - with an opportunity to get ourselves killed for money. Jack's chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors' patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent. - They cannot see the string at this distance, and suppose you are doing some sort of magick. No doubt you have tedious and insufferable qualities of your own, Moseh de la Cruz, but you have me at a disadvantage, as I cannot remember them. No, no, no, now that’s all wrong. This thing will never make a present. It’s been dead for much too long; try something fresher, something pleasant. Why write novels? Rewrite history. The history that then becomes true. I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. How much can a crown be worth, when a crow can dine upon a king? There are no men like me. There's only me. The things I do for love. I seldom fling children from towers to improve their health. Yes, I meant for him to die. Go then. There are other worlds than these. Good grog is one of life's essentials, the other four being memory and forgetfulness, evil friends and honourable enemies. It means nothing to be able to transport yourself anywhere, if you are a fool in all places. Oh, come on. You don't just steal a bottomless pit. I don't wanna explode! He looked bigger when I couldn't see 'im! You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who's in ruttin' command here. You're one-third bad intentions, one-third pure avarice, and one-eighth sawdust. What's left, I'll credit, must be brains. Let's see what's out there. Once upon a time... Looks are an accident, so that's hardly an accomplishment. It's not like they're something you earn. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally. I'm the onion girl. Pull back the layers of my life, and you won't find anything at the core. Just a broken child. A hollow girl. Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys. This was a magic world. Magic happened in it. The nature of magic is change. You know how it is. People call us what they want, but we don't need names to know who we are. I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress. It may be that belief in the supernatural has its basis in experiences of the supernatural, which are common to all races and ages of man. This explanation at least has the merit of being straightforward. Bob sends greetings from sunny Dunkirk. If you shut up, there is an infinitesimal chance of my being able to save you from being tortured to death before sundown. Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody? Boy, was Spielberg ever wrong. Close Encounters, my ass. I'm sick and tired of having people clomp around inside my head! Where do they get these stories? Let's set the facts straight. First off, there was no raping; very little pillaging and Frau Blucher popped all the eyeballs. Have we sent the "Don't shoot, we're pathetic" transmission yet? Oh, great. So he's like one of those mechanics on 60 Minutes who says he's gonna help and then he screws us. I hate it when villains quote Shakespeare. [John and Aeryn stare at surrounding swamp] That's your plan?! Wile E. Coyote could come up with a better plan than that! People think dreams aren't real because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes... Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person's body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person's object of undying hatred. As a young boy, I was not afraid of the dark. As an old man, I am wiser. That's the trouble with writing stories down. Everything gets locked into history, even mistakes, and the stories can't breathe anymore. The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome. First lesson. Stick them with the pointy end. Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. There are certainly too many people in London, but it seems a great deal of work to make them leave one at a time. Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died. The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are. Laughter kills fear, and without fear, there can be no Faith. If man no longer fears the Devil, what need has he of God? I will not be foresworn, Skaldi. Step off the hide or die. Todos los días son lunes (Every day is Monday) I don't know what was most disturbing. His description of the inner core reincarnated souls sex orgy... or the fact that the whole thing is written in screenplay format. - There is more to life than just surviving. ...the great policies of world history, 'the wheel of the world', are often turned not by the Lords and Governers, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak... Sometimes there are no choices. Sometimes it's history decides. Just have to hope history don't get it wrong. We don't choose what we remember, what stays with us. The people of Krikkit are, well, you know, they're just a bunch of real sweet guys, you know, who just happen to want to kill everybody. Hell, I feel the same way some mornings. Play on, mortal. Every god falls at a mortal's hands. Such is the only end to immortality. This is preposterous! Am I to assault the undead with nothing but sticks and harsh language? Her power, her magic, was also a weapon of defense. But it would only work on people. It would not work on a chicken. Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest. I'd hate to think that evil was real, that it existed with a face as plain as the next man's. Respect for life. Sure. The other lesson is just how cheap that life can become. Maybe the former comes from the latter, in which case they're well on their way as it is. Even as the upraised dagger itself is a constant, your freedom to choose who, to choose when, is the constant’s darker lie. An assassin is chaos unleashed, students.But remember, the upraised dagger can quench firestorms as easily as light them. Fighting is for people who fail at everything else. Words can so easily glide over mayhem and terror and horror, it's a wonder trust exists at all. Beware of shadows bearing gifts. Desperate people do desperate things. So do desperate Gods, I suppose. Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of wilful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls. Keep a watch out, fools! There are things out there and you know what happens when things arrive! A god devoid of wisdom deserves what it gets. Suddenly every stranger I meet knows my name. Would you guys please just quit knowing my name for one second? How can a girl be enigmatic under these conditions? I'm just full of quotable crap The miracle of hindsight is how it transforms great military geniuses of the past into incompetent idiots, and incompetent idiots of the present into great military geniuses. Conquer as a rogue wave, rule in quiet ripples. The children of the living and the dead most often take after their dead parents. Life, like red hair or blue eyes, is a recessive gene. He had the urge to ask her what was wrong with everyone. He was huge, with metallic skin. That didn't strike him as "beautiful." At times he wondered if people underwent some sort of selective insanity when they looked at him. - Bolt, this isn't funny. That's the funny thing about arriving somewhere, Vin. Once you're there, the only thing you can really do is leave again. You don't stop loving someone just because they hurt you. It would certainly make things easier if you did. If you're always on time, it implies that you never have anything better you should be doing. The trick is to never stop looking. There's always another secret. To piss across water is to piss across your reflection. Make yourself vulnerable to no one but your family. Because that makes a small enough company that you can watch them all carefully. Always beware of someone who says "You have nothing to fear." Don't do what you can't undo until you've considered what you can't do once you've done it. I want one of my quotes in the database. War needs no gods, only mortal contestants, two enemies and whatever reasons they invent in order to justify killing each other. Rules are for those who follow rules. Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained. Librarian! I do not understand some of the man's words. Find out what that phrase - Nyaahh nyaaah - means in their beastly wolfling tongue! It's every city the world over. Inbred ruling families and moaning priests - a classic case of divided power squabbling and sniping over the spoils of the common folk, with us mules stumbling under the yoke. You might want to have a talk with Sparhawk, friend Vanion. I enjoy a good fight as much as the next man, but if he's going to declare war on the whole universe, he ought to let the rest of us in on his plans. Kruppe prays, oh how he prays, that darkness never falls! That from the depths the flash is but muted in a world vast with light and wonder! Hold back, merciful darkness! We must march on, brave Whiskeyjack! And on! That one's own skull is too worthy a chamber for deception to reign - and yet Kruppe assures you from long experience that all deceit is born in the mind and there it is nurtured while virtues starve. Such a morning! Portents and pastry, wailing and wine! The future, my friend, is ever turned away, even when it faces us. My nipples don't work. No matter how hard I twiddle them, I can't seem to pick up Jazz FM. I wonder where pigeons go when it rains. What's real versus what isn't is the synergy within a mortal's mind. Show me a priest who uses bell, book and 20mm recoilless rifle, and then sue me. Only priests and fools are fearless, and I've never been on the best of terms with God. I know your reputation as a great collector of stories and recorder of events. That said, do not presume to change a word of what I say. If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way. I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted. - Facts, exact numbers, reassurance... a Jedi seeks not these things. We're all just songs in the end. If we're lucky. Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger. Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses. Oh, where are my manners? Do sit down. Pull up a small child. There is entirely too much tut-tutting in this realm, if you ask me. All these kings would do a deal better if they would put down their swords and listen to their mothers. I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off. Do you think you can vanish from my life for sixteen years and then walk in and pour yourself some of my good brandy? Insolence! Inequity ends, Trell, when no-one and no thing is left standing. They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Truth is proved by weight of numbers. That what the many believe to be right, must be so. I'm taller than I look. Bonaduce! Welcome to the Anxious Clown restaurant - where everybody has a good time, whether they like it or not. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell! You made of the Darkness and of the Stars a natural phenomenon and removed all its real significance. That was blasphemy. It is my consolation that you will all be damned for your deeds of today. Let him not condemn himself or another, for he does not know the laws of his existence or theirs. If he sleeps in death, let him sleep. If while sleeping he should meet a god, he must let the god decide how well or ill he lived. A woman with two torches and two hounds is beckoning me from the crossroads, and when I have finished writing this I will go see what it is she wants. I tried to sleep again, but Sleep would not come, though I saw him standing with closed eyes at the edge of the firelight. A man's life is indeed short, ending in death. If it were long, his days would be of small value. If there were no death, of none. Let him fill each day with honor and joy. The god he meets must rule upon a man's life, never the man himself. It's easier to kill people, when you're dead yourself. I mean, it's not such a big deal. You're not so prejudiced anymore. If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. Why you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy looking... nerf herder! I'd just as soon kiss a wookiee. From up here, the matters of Earth look small. That is one way to see, and a good one. But it is not the only one. The farther down you go, the harder things are to understand - but the more important they are. "I will thank you not to be impertinent," Aunt Josephine said, using a word which here means "pointing out that I'm wrong, which annoys me." My chauffeur once told me that I would feel better in the morning, but when I woke up the two of us were still on a tiny island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles, and as I'm sure you can understand, I didn't feel any better about it. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats. Mr. Poe meant well, but a jar of mustard probably also means well and would do a better job of keeping the Baudelaires out of danger. - Tell me, what would your kin say to you in parting? There’s still life in the old lady yet! All I need to find you, Louis, is to follow the trail of dead rats History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. It's very difficult convincing the young of anything. They're born knowing so much. I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence. Mere Gods, ... Held in thrall here ...... By a bitter heart that bides its time and bites. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus. I daresay our enemy feels impregnable just because he commands a heavily armed fort on a rocky crag with walls a hundred feet high and twenty feet thick. But he is in for a surprise! Men on watch at sea have always heard things in the dark. Every disaster starts, "It worked well until..." I was worried you'd tumble to it, but you had so many stars in your eyes about your dear, dear friend Jaya that I could have dressed all in black with a big sign that said "evil necromancer here," and you would have missed it. You hide us so you can publish articles for people you despise. I must be hysterical. These people are planning to kill us. For some silly reason, that bothers me. Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks - all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them. I can play the guitar! I'm a diva, man! I can make that lump of wood sing like a Yukon bear trapper on his annual visit to the brothel. I'm not God, I was just misquoted. He passed away peacefully in his jeep. They call me Little John. But don't let my name fool you. In real life, I'm very big. Let's face it. You've got to be a man to wear tights! Sorry, but a toll is a toll, and a roll is a roll, and if we don't get no tolls, then we don't eat no rolls. I made that up. Life's a bitch, then you rejuvenate and do it all over again. I'm particularly fond of our priesthood of the Benefactor, since our main duties seem to be sitting around and pretending that the Benefactor doesn't exist. When we're not stealing things, that is. Death and guest right. They don't mean so much as they used to, neither one. Halt, ye monsters - there be primed pistols enough here to send all of ye home. A threat is only a promise turned around. We took pity on him because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is. I’d stab a man in the back for a pair of shoes, if he had them and I needed them to keep my feet from freezing. I once did, that’s how I know. Everything that passes unattempted is impossible. I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood. Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo. I think I might just be persuaded, against all experience, that we have here a little endeavour that might just be pursued without filling my streets with inconvenient occult rubbish. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack If we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat. You see, gentlemen, it would be nice to think that someone, somewhere in this city, is engaged in some simple enterprise that is not going to end up causing tentacled monsters and dread apparitions to stalk the streets eating people. One of my predecessors used to have people torn apart by wild tortoises. It was not a quick death. He thought it was a hoot. Forgive me if my pleasures are a little more cerebral, will you? Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer. In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room. Never trust a ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn't in the job. - Full carts congesting the streets, Vimes, is a sign of progress. I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. - And can a magician kill a man by magic? Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people. You think too much, Pearl. It's your most irritating flaw, and, let us be honest, given the severity and sheer volume of your flaws, that is saying something. The Muse descends -- characteristically assuming the mortal guise of an attack of diarrhea, abetted by headache. Anyone can go mad. It's not the prerogative of painters. Or poets. Why do all the Mormons I have known have that same constipated smile? Is their toilet training exceptionally severe? We pretend that Art redeems the time; in truth, it only passes it. Believe me Mordecai, I'd be happy in a world of sylphs and salamanders. Any poet would. What do you think we've beem bellyaching about these past 200 years? We've been evicted. The problem with Magic is that it doesn't work. Exercise is wonderful. I could sit and watch it all day. In life, as in breakfast cereal, it is always best to read the instructions on the box. Have a little faith. I have a Plan. It has a diversion and everything. All right, I admit it. He's got a point. The sunsets are bloody marvelous, you old bastard. Satisfied? NOOOOOOOO!!!! Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. The course of true love never did run smooth. You see, it is possible to define a figure by its relation to those things that surround it. This Fellow is like a baby painting with his own shit upon the nursery wall. The sign of a master is restraint. Power unused is not power, Toa-Sytell. It has occurred to me, on reflection, that Nick Rostu can be regarded as a test of my moral conviction. A Jedi might conceivably fall to the dark from the simple desire to smack the snot out of him. This party's over. This isn't my bone-crushing grip. This is my don't-do-something-stupid grip. We'll graduate to bone-crushing in about ten seconds. The world beyond is very convivial, Mrs Petris, the dead are always at leisure; they may do as they wish. A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. Homo sapiens and their guns This close to a terrible death from suffocation, he didn't want the added torture of listening to French. Friends don't let friends teleport drunk. Orange stealth material. I guess our moravec designers didn't consider the fact that the people we'd be sneaking up on might have eyes as well as radar. You carrying a sword under that cape, or are you just happy to see me? - Just scare him. - Well, look at this! Appears we got here just in the nick of time. What do you suppose that makes us? And don't you ever stand for that sort of thing. Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back. I swear by my pretty flowered bonnet, I will end you. Kaylee, what the hell's going on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose? I aim to misbehave. There is nothing of mercy in the healing, only calculation. Shock is the scar that bridges the gap between the body and the mind. Though you lose your soul, you shall win the world. Magic and art have a great deal in common. No order given to a cat has legal force, you understand. Under the law, each cat is a law unto himself or herself. Well, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one. - Why is it that Master Quell seemed indifferent to unleashing an undead dragon into this world? But just because we let you beat us, Whip us till we're on the floor, Man or woman, we don't care, We like to hurt, we like to bleed, You have played the game of life so many times that you have the smell of a worn deck of cards Death is part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-san, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage. How on earth did this happen, I thought suddenly, that I'm a god, full of human, and running from thousands of Keltic barbarians through this damned woods! Let me sum up: everyone's dead, and the whole Universe is doomed. Well. How are we supposed to cope with an emergency like that? Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning, there was the Word. Then came the...word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the end of literature. And so it goes. 'Happily ever after...' is only true if the story stops there. But real stories never do - they end in sadness and infirmity and death, every one. This is blood for blood and by the gallon. These are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back! There's no choice left. And I'm ready for war. I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad. I would like to say that it is a very great pleasure, honor and privilege for me to open this bridge, but I can't because my lying circuits are all out of commission. Don't try to engage my enthusiasm... because I haven't got one. Don't mention it. Oh, you didn't. I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't. I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed. The first ten million years were the worst ... and the second ten million, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline. That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting. - What are the three most important rules of the chemist? But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment. The sentence would be just. Yes. Still, we have no right in law to take life on our own authority. Those who have that right are properly jealous of it. You see it from the beginning and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. - I've talked to the lawyers Las cosas tienen vida propia. (Things have a life of their own.) Got company??? Nice bit of pork goes down a treat!!! Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. But what the hell, it's home. She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone, unaided. Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare - a pumpkin with a gun. Then your friend Finnan didn't tell you everything. Ask him sometime what it's like to walk the road of all dust. Ask him about the dry wind that blows across the fields of lost days. Ask him. To my face, you say nothing, and consider your silence a kindness. But it mocks me, for it arrives as indifference. Birthing splits a woman in two, the division a thing of raw agony. Splitting young from old. And the child needs, and the mother gives. Do not delve too deeply into the past, for more is hidden than is revealed Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die. When in doubt, delete! They want human beings. You never have to pay for the privilege of getting near them. But you better be damn ready to pay for the privilege of getting away. Beware - it will consume you. - I defenestrated him. - Roger wanted so badly to have a volcano that would spew rivers of molten silver. It would have been spectacular! But Mr. MacDougal was afraid it would set fire to the guests. Now...if you trust in yourself...and believe in your dreams...and follow your star...you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye. How do you expect my husband and me to return to domestic normality? If it's not you it's gods and demons and assassins messing up the bedrooms! Look out! He's got a daisy! This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if I ever saw one. You get a wonderful view from the point of no return. - Just as I thought. You forgot to take the cap off. It's the kind of mistake amateurs always make! All the way to Genua there were people who'd been duped, fooled, swindled, and cheated by that face. The only thing he hadn't done was hornswaggle, and that was only because he hadn't found out how to. It is often said that we live in a paradise. That is a gross exaggeration. We live in an age of great liberty, beauty, comfort, and wealth. But there are injustices and imperfections with the system which cannot be cured. A pious man who worships the Seven so fervently that he eats a meal for each of them whenever he sits to table. You smile and sneer and cuddle up in the comfortable jesuitical universe of College Physics. Matter has no mysteries left for you, oh no! No more than the spirit does. All tidy and known, like a mother's cooking. We turn our eyes away from the charred bones of children outside the incinerators, but what of a gaud who damns infants - often the very same one - to everlasting fires? And for, in each case, exactly the same fault - an accident of birth. It isn't just Germany, and it isn't just Camp Archimedes. It's the whole universe. The whole goddamn universe is a freaking concentration camp. That's the price all good men must pay for knowledge. That's what comes of eating magic apples. Can you scoff at God & believe in Demons? Dante has no frights for the inmates of Buchenwald. You like to make a song and dance out of every spiritual itch and tremble you get. Now, what I'd suggest, if you're going to lose your faith is that you goddamn go to a dentist and have it pulled. It hurts only if you keep playing with it. Science acquiesces, fatally, to the second law of thermodynamics - magic is free to be a conscientious objector. The fact is that I'm not interested in a universe in which I have to die. Yeah, it needs deleted. If the safety of human space depended on my talent for worry, we wouldn't need cops at all. - Mikka! Stop Nick! Do you hear me? Stop him! The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be? So, which do you think is my best side? First in, last out. One man armed with the right word may do what an army of swordsmen cannot. You can shove your apology into the bottom of your one-way digestion system. There will always be another rat. Now: Onward. There are things to do, people to damage. Can't make an omelette without killing a few people. Don't think of us as murderers and cutthroats, miss. Think of us as an escort service. Her days are numbered, and the number in question isn't even in the double digits. You don't want to ask after the health of anyone, if you're a funeral director. They think maybe you're scouting for business. You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color. I cannot recall an instance of any thing very dreadful happening at half-past one. The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him. He was actually trying to be cunning. He was sitting a few feet away from Mr Tulip, a man trying to snort crushed moth repellant, and he was trying guile. You almost had to admire the man. There is an old saying on Vulcan. "Only Nixon could go to China." We are all insects. Groping toward something terrible or divine. Do you not agree? Oh yes, a Londoner can scarce set food out of his house nowadays without being set on fire by a roving Mobb of Swedish Incendiaries! At the risk of being one of those bores who will only venture to state facts after they have become perfectly obvious to all, I guess that my baggage-cart has just been Blown Up. Your candor is bracing. Among my circle, one does not allude so freely to Decapitation of Kings by a Mobb. We don't need a bodyguard, Mister Croup. We hurt people. We don't get hurt. Take me to your hospital and cut out my womb, Doctor. What am I? I am a bottle of reeking slops. And I am wormwood, I am wormwood. I was an apple with a worm born inside. Wormwood! Wild nights are my glory. Stressful? You should try to break into the world's most carefully guarded network with the nurse coming in every few minutes to check your bedpan or insist you finish your rice pudding. Like the ones I know in Other Memory, you are headed for extinction. The problem is that you take so infernally long dying. Inevitable but oh, the boredom meanwhile. I surrender consumed by hopelessness. Kruppe, I now believe, will never play his card, thus leaving us trapped in the unlikely world of his recollections and reminiscences, potentially for ever. Goodnight, one and all. Your grief is mine, and mine may tear the fabric of my soul apart. Twenty of my people have died, and it is in my heart that they are not the last. We are the Children of Light, and the Dark is rising. Ye'll tak' the high road an' I'll tak' yer wallet! They can tak' oour lives but they canna tak' oour troousers! Gol'achab - Not My Funeral It does not matter, my friend, that nothing matters. Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men. This place is called Hungary; Darktree assumes it is the stomach of the continent. It sounds suitable. He vows to so fill Hungary with his presence that it will not ask for seconds. A man who is all courses; such is Darktree. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places must pay. One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten. There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind. Being fed mud pies or flying through the air as a forward pass is bound to keep a baby somewhat alert. The question seldom addressed is where Medusa had snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarassing problem when it keeps biting the top of the deodorant bottle. Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war.' But to get to artificial intelligence, as they say, you have to go through artificial idiocy. Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. You have just met the Angel of Death. He is a stranger. He is always a stranger. And in the closing of the cab door I could hear too many other doors closing. Doors in the past, which are gone now, and cannot be reopened. The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it. Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. ...while in an alley behind a small estate on Low Merchant Way, a diviner of the Deck of Dragons noisily emptied his breakfast of pomegrantes, bread, prunes, and watered wine, surrounded by a ring of dogs patiently awaiting theirs. All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional. They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged. ...and the burial didn't take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Briscall laughed as if being the scum of the earth were a very minor sort of indiscretion and indeed a large part of the Army's charm. This was, thought Strange, an odd position for a clergyman to take. There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and catastrophes. Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn't mix a metaphor. A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on But length aside, there does come a moment for everyone when he is invincible, infallible, immortal. Even if it lasts only an afternoon. Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty. The world is huge in these moments, huge. Too big to bear. Visible to all the ghosts of the world. The center of the universe. It wasn't that people liked Grahame Coats, or that they trusted him. Even the people he represented thought he was a weasel. But they believe that he was their weasel, and in that they were wrong. Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat. Stone circles were common enough everywhere in the mountains.Druids built them as weather computers and since it was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one there were generally plenty of ancient ones around The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to. "This damp will kill us," Mr. Kikin predicted in a stolid way, as if he got killed every morning before breakfast. Several trees tried to strike up a conversation, but Rincewind was nearly certain that this was not normal behavior for trees and ignored them. The King was no help at all in this regard. When asked where the various doors led to, he gave it as his opinion that one door led to America, another to Everlasting Perdition and a third might possibly be the way to next Friday. Who can, will. The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools. Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out He granted himself authority to speak for his people. To surrender. Judas-messiah. A key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is 'Snakes and Ladders' with greased rungs. Men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once. This is the story of a surrender. "The reason of the unreasonable treatment of my reason enfeebles my reason in such wise, that with reason I complain of your beauty." It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problem just with potatoes. Horses, Death felt, shouldn't grin. Any horse that was grinning was planning something. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul. Theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They explain observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. The Icarii, banned from their traditional homes further south, indulged their love of mysticism and magic, their love of seduction, and their undoubted talent for interior decorating. Arthur hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction there and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife. Mr Robinson was a polished sort of person. He was so clean and healthy and pleased about everything that he positively shone - which is only to be expected in a fairy or an angel, but is somewhat disconcerting in an attorney. For a certain period in every life, a person can do no wrong. That period may last an hour, a month, or much longer, and that is the real unfairness of fate. It is always thus at the moment of change, when we rise up out of the everyday and get clear of the blinders of habit, and stand naked to existence, to the moment of choice, vast, dark, windy. Oh, but that city worshipped the flesh; and theirs was the flesh. Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs. It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned. Varney connected his crowbar with the dwarf, who instantly stopped bouncing and darting, and instantly started lying insensible. Just then, Neville caused a slight diversion by turning into a large canary. It was then that Delirium noticed that she had absent-mindedly transformed into a hundred and eleven perfect, tiny multicolored fish. VERMINE: relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions, particularly the Ramtops. Its pelt is rare and particularly valued, especially by the vermine itself. The selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it. Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear. A pigeon hung cruciform on an X of darkwood on Isaac's desk. Its head bobbed frantically from side to side, but despite its terror, it could only emit a bathetic cooing. Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home. He was being very inexact. That wasn't his fault. It was a very inexact apocalypse. The sky above the port was the color of Television, tuned to a dead channel. All children, except one, grow up. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now. Patience never wants Wonder to enter the house: because Wonder is a wretched guest. It uses all of you but is not careful with what is most fragile or irreplaceable. Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. It's that simple. I come from comic books. If sci-fi is the gutter of literature, comics are the place that the gutter flows into. There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts. I've got a better idea. How about I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call? What do you mean, you've lost a day? I haven't got it. Let me tell you about the city: The city is sharp, the city is a cliché performed with cardboard and painted sparkly colors to disguise the empty center - the hole. Ooh, look out, I'm a Jedi! I know things Too Dangerous for Ordinary Mortals! If you don't stand back, I might tell you something Beings Were Not Meant to Know! Y'know, I'm gonna give up asking if you're crazy. Let's consider it a standing question, huh? Isn't this fun? If we aren't going to survive, we won't know it until we're already dead. I like simple plans - they leave room for inspiration. That's the trouble with killing humans. All that work, and nothing to eat for it. It is faith that makes them true, not they who make faith true. To fall in love for the first time is a devastating, unbearable event for any peasant enamored of a milkmaid with pimples; so imagine what it can mean for a peasant to fall in love for the first time with a twenty-year-old empress. There are no stories without a meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even where others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust Blood is the life, and blood that is spilled carries away with it the souls of the living. Animals die, friends die, and I shall die, but one thing never dies, and that is the reputation we leave behind at our death. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. We bear a legacy of loss, passed down to us by our ancestors. We bear the memory of what we had, and what was taken. All peoples think they are forever. They do not believe they will ever not be. Each small darkness breeds another. Each small incident of anger, bitterness, pettiness and greed breeds others. Our war continues, the war we wage against each other, the war we wage against ourselves. Their madness is of their own making, and yet they are powerless against it because they refuse to acknowledge its source. They are at war with themselves, but they do not begin to understand the nature of the battle being fought. Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define "dangerous." Is a knife "dangerous"? Is Russian roulette "dangerous"? Is arsenic "dangerous"? It depends on your perspective. Elia Martell, Princess of Dorne. You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children. Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious. Who's the more foolish... the fool or the fool who follows him? Men die, cattle die, you yourself must die one day. There is only one thing that will not die - the name, good or bad, that you have made for yourself. Now, rise with us now, eleventh hour though it be, if you want to rescue the doomed sons of the Achaeans from Trojan slaughter. Sometimes it may be difficult to believe in one's friends, Hockenberry, son of Duane, but one must always believe in one's enemies. Especially if you are privileged to count the gods amongst your enemies. There will also be a small additional penalty of six million years in prison. - Broccoli. You can't go wrong with broccoli. The trouble is, you can't live in two worlds - you always pick one, even if you don't mean to. The only constant in a man's soul is inconstancy. Why do we need winter, when summer is so much sweeter? It must be for our sins. You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die. Your words sound like someone taught by machines - what you don't know, young manor-born, is that cosmopolitan societies are sometimes just as ruthless about crushing those who don't conform. Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Answers cost plenty. Answers are worth more than the breaking of curses. Answers are not easily found... When we truly apprehend the Gods, the Nilnameshi sages say, we recognize them not as kings but as thieves. This is among the wisest of blasphemies, for we always see the king who cheats us, never the thief. In the mornings, when I wake, I look into my mirror and talk to it, and learn who I've become while asleep. My kind has much experience with arrogant creatures. Although that experience is singular: in answer to their arrogance we proclaimed eternal war, until they ceased to exist. The heart is neither given nor stolen. The heart surrenders. Men are forever pointing at others, which is why I always follow the knuckle and not the nail. They strike down the weak and call it justice. They ungird their loins and call it reparation. They bark like dogs and call it reason. Men never resemble one another so much as when asleep or dead. Autobots! Transform and roll out! Do not judge a warrior by stature or action until you truly understand that which drives him. Don't believe everything you hear from a crow. Believe what you like. You'll be surprised how comforting it is. Prophecies do not have to be a scam, Mistress. Or even, really, a promise for the future. They can simply be an expression of hope. There is no right, no wrong, in this world, not any longer. The machine-minds watch us, and they take care that we do not harm each other. Morality means nothing, now. - I would say that massive quantum phase-shift activity is a sign of something pretty technological. Rhetoric is the art of saying well that which may or may not be true, and it is the duty of poets to invent beautiful falsehoods. I may be a cold-blooded jelly doughnut, but my timing's impeccable. It is said that naming something gives one power over it, and similarly, knowing the name of something or someone evil lessens their power to harm. Perhaps by naming your hurt, you will lessen its power to distress. Most artisans do not own what they make. No, Eris. Because you never meant to harm me, and never played me false. There's beauty in that, and more than I had sense to realize. I should have given you the apple because it belongs to you by right. Even women who speak little talk too much. You're confusing innocence with ignorance, though I'm ignorant in many ways as well. Innocence is something one chooses, and something one chooses for the same reason ones chooses any other thing - because it seems best. I've been bad many times, I'm afraid. I regret them all. We are so much like beasts, Kypris. We eat and we breed; then we spawn and die. The most humble share in a higher existence is worth any sacrifice. For whatever inscrutable reasons, the gods thrust bios into the whorl knowing nothing of it; and if they waited until they were so wise as to make no mistakes before they acted, they waited forever. It's too late to apologize, I've already forgiven you. They called Arrakis the place of the unknown where all mysteries were explained. This was the link between their universe and the next. And the frightening thing was that they appeared to go away satisfied. There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings. Ideas are most to be feared when they become actions. Long story. Very long story. Think Robert Jordan and multiply by three. When in doubt, pretend you're not. To die will be an awfully big adventure. Brothels are a much sounder investment than ships, I've found. Whores seldom sink, and when they are boarded by pirates, why, the pirates pay good coin like everyone else. A trade envoy from Lys once observed to me that Lord Stannis must love his daughter very well, since he'd erected hundreds of statues of her all along the walls of Dragonstone. 'My lord,' I had to tell him, 'those are gargoyles.' Let me understand your argument. You want me to take on faith that I have always had the strength of character to never take things on faith. If Art is an irritant, like grit, good sir, then spend your genius praising the society cosmopolitan enough to tolerate it! How do you think simple societies maintain their simplicity? By intolerance. Men hunt; women gather; virgins guard the sacred flame. Anyone who steps outside their stereotypic social roles is crushed. Questions are dangerous, for they have answers. There is nothing redder than fresh-spilled blood on virgin snow. The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them. - That's the thing about work. It's something you can throw yourself into and not worry any more. Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood. Today it is cold, the light is dim, this vellum is hairy, something is wrong. That's the problem with eternity. It gets f---ing everywhen. - I don't have a choice. It's war. Criminy, your education is a mess! I began life wanting to create something as beautiful as this, but all my time and energy, all my talent, has gone to waste. Now I can only build machines of death for money. I have won battles, and in the process lost my soul. Create, Piero. Create something beautiful, or life is meaningless. We call for night to hide our acts, You can't never back down. You back down and they're gonna walk all over you. Not just today, but every goddamn day. You trust me on that one, Raylene. Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Armpit One Midsummer Morning Stwike him, Centuwion. Stwike him vewy wuffly! The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie. - You got to stop it! is there any way to stop it? Stupid, stupid rat creatures!! There are stranger things than death - stranger and older. Did you know that? This is what murder does. It does not make one phantom only - it makes hundreds. Once these halls were full of people I knew, even though I might not have liked them all. Now the house is crowded with demons and ghosts. There is no season so dark that it does not see the sun come again. I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite. Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground. You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? Good news everyone, I've taught the toaster how to love. Oh, they say madness runs in our family. Some even call me mad. And why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen with octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood... Oh, I always feared he would run off like this. Why? Why? Why didn't I break his legs? A planet so high in gravity, you'll most likely be crushed by the weight of your own hair. Enjoy. Everyone's always in favour of saving Hitler's brain. But when you put it in the body of a great white shark, ohhhh! Suddenly you've gone too far! Your genes remember how to kill. Come, let me show you the instrument of destruction. Where the holy take men for fools, the mad take the world. To the wise, a single word is as good as a poem. And here you sit, and tell me lies about Earth, where you have clearly never been, and pretend you do not understand that it is only by possessing slaves that any man can be truly free. When I say let me think, I mean shut up. Listen to you two! We're about to be attacked by giant wizard-eating fish and you're reminiscing! There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks. I just make s*** up and people like to read it. Have you seen my picture on the jacket? I look like the missing member of Air Supply Like manure, profanity is most effective when it's spread. I'd like to say a big 'hello' to all you intelligent lifeforms out there, and for the rest of you, the trick is to bang those rocks together, guys! Stop asking questions. The dark crimes which stain my soul, brother, you cannot begin to imagine. Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it. Didn't I just tell you to shut up? Parents are certainly a disappointment to their children, but they're an even bigger disappointment to themselves. That's the thing... the thing that's hardest to bear. I am the Demon of Pestilence. I can decimate populations, inflict plagues across continents, cause life itself to become nothing but a never-ending scourge. Think you that I can't manage a bunch of twaddle-headed maidservants? We must beat our own path. I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead. I read this, as you do, with hope for my sanity and hope for salvation, not of my soul, but salvation of the self in the renewed certainy of reunion - real reunion, physical reunion - with the one whom I remember and love above all others. Wouldn't we all like to imagine that we are so within, filled with valuable, beautiful, and indestructible things, not this vulnerable and stinking offal? I see. So as long as you grow enough arms to use all your guns at once, you'll smoke the opposition? If you forgive an agnostic's scepticism, I'd say you're going to die. It occurs to me, that you're an arrogant, ridiculous, piss-eyed, mullock-brained, dung-engendered bastard, and you deserve to be forgotten by the world. Whatever your head's worth, it's overpriced! Does General Anforth know he's searching for an empty vessel? Watch out, men! You are not so pretty that you can handle a woman's blade! There were three things a girl had to live for, she'd tell me, men, money, and partying, and not necessarily in that order. - If they are so unhelpful, why do you worship them? Your past has murkier things in it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup. My God, he thought. Here I am fishing for a spacetime wormhole. On any other day this would seem unusual. A society that does not remember is not worth remembering. Rememberer Anton, nothing is ever just a story. Master Kosta. What a pleasure! Selendri tells me you've expressed an interest in getting killed. You are thinking we should use force to defend you against yourself against your will? That is hardly a thought worth thinking, sir. Your life has exactly the value you yourself place on it. It is yours to damage or ruin as you wish. I am the Bringer of Death. I am the one spoken of in prophecy. If ever, he decided, they made disorganization an Olympic sport, he could be disorganized for Britain. Have you ever got everything you ever wanted? And then realized it wasn't what you wanted at all? I mean, it's not a homing pigeon. It's just a normal London pigeon. The kind that craps on Lord Nelson. This ordeal of yours. How much of an ordeal is it? Well we know what to get you for Christmas! A double lobotomy and ten rolls of rubber wallpaper. Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos were lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop wearing wet copper armor and shouting, "All gods are bastards." Also, I can kill you with my brain. Rhaegar won, damn him. I killed him, Ned, I drove the spike right through that black armor into his black heart, and he died at my feet. They made up songs about it. Yet somehow he still won. He has Lyanna now, and I have her. The past is like that. When it finally taps you on the shoulder, it's never the thing you thought it to be. The intelligent pattern of protoplasm that had been Robert L Forward ceased coherent operation on September 21, 2002. Lord, what fools these mortals be! Ah, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say Ni at will to old ladies. All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. Willpower and dedication are good words… There’s a bad one, though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession. Hile! Hile! To me, gunslingers! To me! Ride them down! No prisoners! Wish that would happen with me and Lavender. But the more I hint I want to finish it, the tighter she holds on. It's like going out with the giant squid. 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. Take you me for a sponge, my lord? What good could we have? We eat mice. "Mice Are Our Mainstay," that's what Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, teaches. A fat man always sits comfortable, I am thinking, for he takes his pillow with him wherever he goes. It pays to do the obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right! To define is to lose. The essence of all things is the Nameless. I believe everything I say, though I know I’m a liar. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. I have many names, and none of them matter. It's a metaphor for human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that isn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing. If anyone is going to burn down this city, it's going to be me! Sergeant-at-arms, that's like sergeant with all the trimmings. Don't get many gods in here, as a rule. Someone's pinched the secret of fire, have you seen my golden apple? It's amazing how often we don't get that sort of thing in the crime book. If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes. The thing about fires, Vimes had once observed, was that only an idiot got between them and a troll holding a 2,000lb crossbow. All Hell hadn't been let loose. It was merely Detritus. But from a few feet away you couldn't tell the difference. The only reason you couldn't say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away. We're just one big family and, when you've been to a few domestic disputes, Littlebottom, I can assure you that you'll see the resemblance. Don't try to put me at my ease, Miss von Humpeding. It makes me nervous when people do that. It's not as though I have any ease to be put at. You've a willing horse, so flog him another mile. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and no one but a moron would trust the legal system. Otherwise, you'll have to introduce me to your friends Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal? I don't know how many! A cotillion's worth. Perhaps a regiment. I am not accustomed to counting ghosts. There are enough for several bridge games with ample left over for a jury. It's a darned shame - the damage that being saved and civilized does to a place. What a disappointment it means in terms of what a tourist gets to see. It's not easy being a Samurai in a world full of Ninjas. Though here at journey's end I lie in darkness buried deep, beyond all towers strong and high, beyond all mountains steep, above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars forever dwell: I will not say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell. The wind's changed. Something's happening. He ran. But not very fast. Paint stripes on a toad, he does not become a tiger. Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they'll do. Sangamon's Principle; The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is Oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide - a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol - nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms. Their dreams were full of songs and stories, the way hers had been before Joffrey cut her father's head off. Sansa pitied them. Sansa envied them. It's an interesting notion, Stragen. First I ruthlessly crush rebellion, then I invite the rebels into the government. It should confuse them, if nothing else. All history is legend, more or less. Gibbets and Crows! Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll around on the floor with their dogs! Too bad for me Jack's deaf as a post. Unless, of course, I use the words "pizza" or "boobies". Life is problems. Living is solving problems. TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!) Each moment deserves its own song. The right belief is like a good cloak, I think. If it fits you well, it keeps you warm and safe. The wrong fit, however, can suffocate. The enemy doesn't really want to fight you, 'cos the enemy is mostly blokes like you who want to go home with all their bits still on. But officers'll get you killed. Best of luck, lads. You'll walk with Death every day, but I've seen 'im and he's been known to wink. And remember: fill your boots with soup! Theres no difference between this world and the world of Fifth Avenue. Life is full of blackguards. Some wear fine suits and bilk great masses of humanity; some have shoes with gaping holes and break into warehouses. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. It is said: a man is born of his mother and is fed of his mother. Then he is fed of the land, and the land passes through him, taking and giving a pinch of dust each time, until man is no longer of his mother, but of the land. It's not so hard to see the future. All ye've got to do is look into a fire... It's not so hard to see the future, Doc. It's changing it. It's changing it. Some mysteries are better off with their throats slit. - Is that Styric? It doesn't sound like Styric to me. You know the best thing about heroes, Jaime? They all die young and leave more women for the rest of us. Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit. We are not born innocent, simply unmeasured. Only those with narrow minds fail to see that the definition of Impossible is 'Lack of imagination and incentive.' Alright sweethearts, what're you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? Another glorious day in the corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal's a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the corps! It's not lying when you do it to officers! It's presentin' them with the world the way they think it ought to be! Blah blah blah. Will you stop saving the world and get a hobby? Every meal is your last. The tongues of men are older than our drowned land; and it seems strange that in so great a time no words have been found for the pauses in speech, which have each their own quality, as well as a certain length. We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. During the brief time I have occupied the throne, many issues have been of more immediate concern than monomachy. Whether it is good or evil (as I am inclined to think), it is surely ineradicable in a society such as ours. If my memories of the past remain intact, perhaps it is only because the past exists only in memory...That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin. Nevertheless, we all seek to discover what is real. Why is it? Perhaps we are drawn to the theocenter. That's what the hierophants say, that only that is true. Resolution and a plan are better than a sword, because a man whets his own edges on them. When we are talking to women, we talk as though love and desire are two separate entities; and women, who often love us and sometimes desire us, maintain the same fiction. History shows that every age has some unquestioned neurosis, and Master Palaemon had taught me that clemency is ours, a way of saying that one less one is more than nothing, that since human law need not be self-consistent, justice need not be. Knowing that my case was hopeless, I learned in my own person what Master Malrubius had once impressed on me when I was a child: that hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities. My pen halts,though I do not. I have carried you from gate to gate-from the locked and fog-shrouded gate of the necropolis of Nessus to that cloud-racked gate we call the sky, the gate that shall lead me,as I hope beyond the nearer stars. There is a dialogue in the brown book somewhere between two mystes, in which one argues that culture was an outgrowth of the vision of the Increate as logical and just, bound by the interior consistency to fulfill his promises and threats. Perhaps it is only that when we contend with evil, we are engaged against our brothers. If there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, Dr. Talos's face was a fox's mask on a wall. On the other hand, if we love her, we soon come to desire her, since attraction is one of the attributes a woman should possess, and we cannot bear to think she is without any of them. If a man is no more than such a colony [of cells], a man is nothing; but we know instinctively that a man is more. What happens, then, to that part that is more? Whatever I possess I would give to become one of you, who complain every day of memories fading. My own do not. They remain always, and always as vivid as at their first impression, so that once summoned they carry me off spellbound. There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity. By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow - so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to mangaeable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us. All right, we are devils, if you would have it so. But we are necessary. Even the powers of Heaven find it necessary to employ devils. It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true. My pen halts, though I do not. Reader you will walk no more with me. It is time we both take up our lives. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all. Sometimes when all our attention is thus focused on memory, our eyes, unguided by ourselves, will distinguish from a mass of detail some single object, presenting it with a clarity never achieved by concentration. If we desire a woman, we soon come to love her for her condescension in submitting to us, and since if we desire her she always submits in imagination at least, some element of love is ever present. Life, after all, is not a high thing, and in many ways is the reverse of purity. I am wise now, if not much older, and I know it is better to have all things, high and low, than to have the high only. Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not simple, but a complex man's idea of simplicity. - You're laughing at me now. Art had been lavished upon her; but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her. My hunger fed at least as ravenously upon her imperfections. She possessed the hopeful, hopeless courage of the poor, which is perhaps the most apealing of all human qualities; and I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me. I have seen balconies torn from their walls by the weight of the watchers, killing more in their single crash than I in my career. These scores and hundreds may be likened to the readers of a written account. The present can always change its future. Perhaps death is only horrible to us because it's a dividing of the terror of life from the wonder of it. We see only the terror, which is left behind. I'm no diplomatist, but for the other business, I can honestly say I have received long training. Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all. "Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Munnin, or whoever you are." Normally people who die stay in their graves. You play your cards so close to your chest that I'm not even sure that they're really cards at all. Christ, what an imagination I've got. Naturally, the book was based, in the first place, on the testimony of those least qualified to serve as historians; that is, children and morons; and was probably edited and redited through the cycles. Have you ever experienced Darkness, young man? Hack the body, and the mind will follow. There is no problem that we cannot solve through scientific innovation. There is no problem that we should not solve through scientific innovation. - Are they slow-moving, chief? Sure, it's big. But look at the location. A true god would know another god's story. They know all the stories that are. I may be dead, but I'm not easy. Exactly how dead does this guy have to be? Go away. This is not a place to be. If you do try to enter here, you will fail and also be cursed. If somehow you succeed, then do not complain that you entered unwarned, nor bother us with your deathbed prayers. Signed, The Gods. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Adventure, excitement, a Jedi craves not these things. Has it not occurred to you that clinical examination of oneself is yet another obsession? What you dissect has to be dead first - that's the principle of dissection, after all. - You're out of your mind. - I'd never shot anyone before. You have the choice anyone has. Die now or later. Why do we fight, if not to purge our evil? We're afraid to die and afraid to live - afraid of what we might do. So we shout and charge. If we were good... Not even those who see the face of the Most High God grant all prayers. How do you know so much about swallows? The heart rots, Daniel, Sometimes it even begins to rot while its owner still lives. With a lance of prayer and a horse of air, summoned I am to tourney, ten thousand leagues beyond the moon. Methinks it is no journey. Other countries have stories of kings who wil return at times of great need. Only in England is it part of the constitution. - Dragons don't exist. They are just rumor and myth. Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem. These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent paradimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front. No, that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that. My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death! There's always time for science. And now, if you have anything more to ask, I can't think how you can manage it, for I've never heard anyone tell more of the story of the world. Make what use of it you can. Visions are like dreams, where things are transformed one into another, not like the images of your church, where things remain always the same. For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty. Sleep, when deep enough, is indistinguishable from vigilance. Stories, you see, are alive, or else not worth the telling. It's a personal thing between Aphrael and me. I won't win many arguments with her, but I am going to win the one about whales. I hope she fries. I'm free if that bitch dies... I'd better help her out. History is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it. There's one at the door, A Miracle! Every meal is a little miracle, you know. Herrings especially. I died from eating miraculous herrings. I am the rightful king, and your son no less traitor than my brother here. His day will come as well. Kings have no friends, only subjects and enemies. Why had the Ferryman been so reverential of Azhure? Was it simply her beauty? No, not that. The Ferryman did not look as though he was capable of bedding a limp sack of grain, let alone Azhure. But when the enemy is finally driven far from your shore, and your houses are restored and your fields begin to yeild and your flocks to increase, why, then it becomes time to find fault with your neighbors again. He supposed the gentleman must be a guest of Sir Walter's or Lady Pole's - which explained the gentleman, but not the room. Gentlemen are often invited to stay in other people's houses. Rooms hardly ever are. There's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. Well, that's just great! Everybody gets blessed but me! Where's the justice in that? Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou! - The Fourteenth's motto. I rather imagine that my father regretted all the money he spent on my fencing lessons. The expression on his face while he was dying seemed to indicate that he was regretting something. I've got rooks and ravens, crows and starlings. Fine, wise birds. Tasty and wise. Brilliant. That's where an old wizard terrified me in the middle of the night. That's where I watched the city burn. That's where I was nearly eaten by a fourteen-year-old girl. Ah, the happy memories... Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs. Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. His mutant rap burn down whole block Sometimes success demands a certain refined insanity. May everything be as it seems. Cake! You are slow for a knight. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fire is Life... Then, when one has had enough of that, it's great fun to kill something. Or a bunch of somethings. As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney. Another turning of the wheel, madam, and who knows? Things may yet be better than even once they were. - How cold is that water? I mean, has it started to warm up at all? All things are possible, even the impossible. I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus. I'm dumb with it. I'm dumb with wonder. There is no redemption in the sea. It is unsettling to dream another's dreams. We're supposed to follow a Mother Superior's orders with absolute devotion. And we do, except when we disagree. It's not everybody who gets a chance to have their names misspelled in the history books. Normally, I wouldn't presume to guess how the drogues think. Right now, I'm fairly certain that they're pissed off. Sending me to hell won't make me any less evil, you know. - and then Uncle Trapspringer said, 'Are you sure that's your walrus?' And the barbarian said-Oh, hello, Raistlin! Look at me! I'm tied to a chair. Isn't this exciting? I'll bet Sturm would tie you up if you asked him politely. Would you, Sturm? Gordon, is the funding. Shall I spell that for you? It starts F-U. The only death I fear is dying ignorant. I don't know three women, Bugg. And if I did, all of them arriving simultaneously would be cause for terror, rather than an incidental "oh by the way." - I don't think I've ever seen so many scars on one person. What do you do in your spare time, Bugg, wrestle angry cacti? Sympathy belongs to the small-membered, Bugg. And beauty, it passes so quickly, doesn't it just? But misery, ah, misery abides. - You're incredible, you know that? - As these humans kill lesser species to survive, so I kill them. I am confident that you will recognize my unique voice in the new books and that you will feel right at home. Except, perhaps, you may now be afraid to turn out the lights when you go to bed. In the swamp the alligators drifted like patches of bad-assed water. "Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged". For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it. Also, prepare yourself to be surprised. The world is a different place than you know. It may be that you will believe we have failed to prepare you for it. Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place. To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You are all very stupid people. Still trying to find out if you'll be joining us when you pass on? - Time is not accessible to manipulation. There are no crimes when no one is left alive. This is the nature of humanity. Even if only two people are left in the entire universe, they will come to represent opposing factions. Those of you lucky enough to have your lives take them with you. However, leave the limbs you've lost. They belong to me now. It's mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality. Wiggle your big toe. I killed my way to this city before you were born. I won my riding in war and fire. I've butchered things no liveman has even seen. I am the Brucolac, and you sword won't save you. You think you can face me? This is a city, Uther. We live; we buy; we sell; we steal; we trade. We are a port. This is not about adventures. And now I must fly. Except that I mustn't. One's never alone with a rubber duck. That's it: we're deader than tank tops! She wants something to love, I think. Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well. It's hard to tell with creatures like that. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain - the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn. We’re all mad here. Good evening. You must be the mob. Human beings want to know too much about each other. And that's why there are so many lies. Only in silence the word, Do not be too quick to judge the creators of worlds. Will you ever write a story for which no character will have cause to reproach you? There are always enemies beyond the borders, and if none exist in truth, then one must be fashioned. Words are symbols. Merryn chooses to delimit magic as that which does not exist...and so it does not exist. If you choose to call what we are about to do here magic, then magic lives while we do it. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any other man's death is required to consummate the series of my being; but it requires my own. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? Man! you may hate, but beware! your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous even you turned from me in disgust? Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have its mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. I have decided that conquering with Dark Armies is... outmoded. Old-fashioned. Passé. If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse. Because it's the ones who are most determined who recover most quickly... When they give up, nobody can help them. Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them has to be right. They shall see me and remember who is the real King under the Mountain! Tut, tut, child! Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it. Because this is England and we don't massacre people in England! Or rather, we do but we are striving to turn over a new leaf. Only the weak and useless are truly free. The deer fulfills his purpose by providing sustenance for the hunter - be it wolf or man. We do not mourn the loss of those who die fulfilling their destinies. Beware, Stephen! There will probably be a magical combat of some sort. I dare say I shall have to take on different forms - cockatrices, raw head and bloody bones, rains of fire, etc., etc. You may wish to stand back a little! These guests of mine on whose account you are so scrupulous, they are all my vassals and subjects. There is not one of them who would dare to criticize me or any one I chose to call my friends. And if they did, why! we could always kill them! Do nothing unless you must, and when you must act - hesitate. Yes, you're very smart. Now shut up. When I was your age, television was called books! Imitation has prostituted everything, right down to the pin in your cravat! Though experience is a sickness offering little danger of contagion, you must not expose yourself to the influence of others, and that includes your own shadow. Women give you too much trouble or they're not worth the effort. People your dreams with those you like, and they'll be yours while you sleep! Shun as much as possible, venereal diseases, but if you must choose between a prize for virtue and one for syphilis, don't hesitate an instant: mercury isn't half as bad as abstinence! This is religion, boy. Not comparison bloody shopping! You Shall Not Subject Your Gods To Market Forces! That's right, kid. Never play an ace if a two will do. SQUEAK! "Begin at the beginning," the King said, gravely, "and go on till you come to the end; then stop." Ni! We are the keepers of the sacred words: Ni, Ping, and Nee-womm! I suggest they have won. He did cheat Fate. If you do cheat Fate, I do not believe it says anywhere that Fate's subsequent opinion matters. It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping. The connections are elaborate. Summarizing them would require both creativity and discretion. As a mechanical entity, I have neither. You understand...It is too far. I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy. - One day, all this will be yours, lad! And then the fun begins. But, by then, i'll be long gone. Good-bye, gunslinger. My part is done now. The chain is still in your hands. Beware it doesn't wrap itself around your neck. Nice in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters. What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There's really nothing quite like total ignorance, is there? Mithrandir! Mithrandir! Now we know that the storm is indeed nigh! If it's a question of take the money and run, I for one could do with the exercise. Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality. The entire universe is a revelation. All things change, yet all things remain. All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there, use them together, use them in peace. I don't have a personality; I am a cocktail, a conglomerate, a riot of personalities. Ah, if only I'd known that death is a country where no one can live! When life is exclusively human - all too human - can the workings of the mind result in anything except an infirmity more grandiose and tedious than any other? If I'd had the slightest inkling of what I was going to hear after death, I would never have committed suicide. Under these conditions, I sincerely believe that the best thing to do is swallow a capsule of dynamite and then, with complete tranquillity, light up a cigarette Some have a taste for mountain climbing. Others like to play dominoes. For me, nothing compares to transmigration. Asbestos pants and testicular lightning rods afford zero protection How could he have known that the solitude of asceticism is filled with naked women, and that all knowledge is humbled before the physiomechanics of a mosquito? Do we have to do anything but open our eyes to be convinced that reality is, in reality, the most authentic of miracles? The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture - although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell this ship. Your talents were under-rated. You've got a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not. Nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway - that's because they're all such liars. The only external forces that have any influence on us are those we can see every day: the smile, the frown, the fist, the brick wall. What you call 'destiny' is merely a semantic fallacy, the attribution of purpose to blind causality. Take no pride in the praise of men, for thus you become a slave to the opinions of others, and will do evil if men will praise you for it. At court I have learned a few things: if you are with great men, you are become great; great men in reality are very small; power is everything, and there is no reason why one day you could not seize it yourself, at least in part. Dear Lord Jesus, even in my most drunken state would I ever have imagined I'd be sticking anything up a Magi's ass! You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man. Heads will roll in any case. It is only a question of which and how many. I mourn you, old beldame Church, glorious courtesan of singularly corruptible gold! If I had a drop in my flask I would drink to you, even though your weak-blooded latterday bishops have succeeded in making you respectable. Ah, well, my son ... ah, well ... what are we without our regrets? My soul longs for God, but a man is not just his soul, is he? Terrible to say, my clay lusts after the clay of nubile girls. Consideration for others will you get into Heaven, so have some consideration for me, and die quickly. God! We long for God! God who we've been talking about for three years! You, my son, cheat yourself with your indifference. You should be terrified, when instead you're arrogant! If you never reach heaven, don't say I didn't warn you. You're a dreadful creature. You get a little life, a few years of feeling important, or of feeling as if you ought to be important. Then, long before you're ready, it's all over. Judgement time. Wheat or chaff, sheep or goat, fair or foul. No second chances; no appeal. You're doing it again. Using reason to argue faith. Can't be done. Like playing croquet with a crochet hook. Sounds something like the right tool for the job, but isn't. You're spiritually senseless! If you could observe the vacuum in your soul, you'd scream out in horror for something to fill it. And only God's infinity would suffice. You would have to submit, or go mad! Whatever you know of suffering, I can promise you that I know more. And I'd be happy to do without it. But, unfortunately, just as ore must be smelted to make gold, suffering ennobles us. My son, the only way you'll get old enough to write your memoirs is if you get yourself into prison now, quickly, and stay there. But don't expect anyone to read them. After you're dead, no one'll give a shit, mark my words. I wish, that this was a hundred years ago. I could have you roasted over coals for blasphemy and then I'd win. What the soul can house, flesh cannot fathom. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, All that is gold does not gllitter, The past is a bitter place. Only the path of forgetfulness leads ultimately to redemption. FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD You understand? There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that. I'll talk as much as you like, but I won't tell you anything. That's pretty rotten, isn't it? You should have seen me when I was alive. How much for just the civilization? Before I met you, did you sort of... fall down? Maybe on your head? It was just a maddened crocodile hidden in a flower bed. It could have happened to anyone. There is your error. You aim too high. The Earth is too wide and rife with mystery to be saved or damned by such as you. Some say it is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. That is a defeatist attitude. I intend to rule everywhere, not just in Hell. History rarely notices those who remain content. Let us leave heroics to the fools who are impressed by it. Here's the deal. You lend me a small part of your anatomy, and I let your soul get tortured forever. Aww, look! She's bonding! I tellya, when a gal like K3-MYRLU bonds with ya, ya gotta remember two things; first, it's for life. Second, it's with your central nervous system. EXTRAVAGANT SECULAR SWARMING Come not between the Nazgul and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me! Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain? Flowers are better theology than folios, Severian. Here Rose the Graced, not Rose the Chaste, reposes. How hard can it be to write one of those fantasy books, anyway...? You know, on a per-inch basis, you may be the most unpleasant person I've ever met. Science - you're calling leeches "science"? What do you call thumbscrews and the rack - "probation"? Curse the SunSoars' curious attraction for deep crisis. It was a remarkable achievement if they managed to get through a child's name-day feast without the need for a war council in the middle of it. Foes and fires are before you and your homes far behind. And although you fight on alien soil, the glory you reap shall be yours forever. Oaths ye have made; now fulfill them all, to lord and land and league of friends. The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate? Ride now! Ride for ruin and the world's ending! Never underestimate the perverse power of everything to go wrong, to tend toward trouble. Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him. To oppose something is to maintain it. Four nights will quickly dream away the time; The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Destinations are often a surprise to the destined. When we got outside, December was still there and the cold air smelled chemical, like a refinery or a tenth-grade chemistry class deep into the secrets of stink. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken. Leper, Outcast, Unclean!! It's easy being a god. If you have the right equipment. An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo. You know what we should do? We should kill Mavra. We could make it a family project. In terror, all men throw up their hands and turn aside their faces. Remember, Tratta, always preserve the face! For that is where you are. Wait not for horse and war, Wolves and ravens win all wars. - And then there was the headless horseman! He had no head! No more icebergs looking like me. I don't want to be a face that sinks a thousand ships. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story. A good king is one who is trusted by his people - and one who deserves that trust. Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius. Anything surprising, be it an ambush or an unplanned skirmish - the enemy invariably came from your travelling wardrobe, Sorceress. The Lord is my sheperd. I shall want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green grasses. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung fu in the face of my enemies. Amen. M-O-O-N, that spells sore feet. Getting out of Hell is a bit like successfully defrauding the Revenue; many people will tell you they know someone who's managed it, but the name somehow eludes them. Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married. The past is what it is; all you can change is what you think of it. Him who mountain crush him no Well, you can lie down on the bed. I am going to stand in the rain. Good night! It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again. The unobserved state is a fog of probabilities, a window of and for error. The watcher observes, the fog collapses, an event resolves. A theory becomes a fact... What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? Why must I conquer, you ask? War makes clear. Life or Death. Freedom or Bondage. War strikes the sediment from the water of life. ...and my soldiers, they say, make idols of their swords. But does not the sword make certain? Does not the sword make plain? Does not the sword compel kindness from those who kneel in its shadow? I need no other god. They're the blank on the map, the ruins underfoot, the empty mirror. The clouds in the sky that look like tigers. Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain. - I am the most miserable person who ever lived. You, sapper, are the scum beneath a pebble in a stream running through a field of sickly pigs. Right. You should blame God. First he makes hangovers, and now, half women, half sharks that won't even sleep with me. Thanks for nothing, God! Look, in twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast-food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure. The ones who look the most suspicious are likely innocent. It's the ones who look innocent I need to beware. Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you. Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them. Dwarfs don't have to be tactful. Generations of capering fools in motley have won me the right to dress badly and say any damn thing that comes into my head. People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up. Now that's where you're wrong, Father. Why, I believe I'm you writ small. Do me a kindness now, and die quickly. I have a ship to catch. Let them see that their words can cut you, and you'll never be free of the mockery. The gods give with one hand and take with the other. I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother. If a man paints a target on his chest, he should expect that sooner or later someone will loose an arrow at him. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs. Those are brave men. Let's go kill them. Some battles are won with swords and spears, others with quills and ravens Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner. Yours is a race of pawns. You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns. [Careful/ That cat is too big for his bloody boots... If the cost of that is that we must tame society, make it predictable, break its spirit, and kill its dreams, aha! So be it! I only spoke to let us all be aware that we are doing this for self-centered and ignoble reasons. Thou art God. Oh, yes. They'll believe that. 'I didn't know it would kill Andrew. And when he was dead, I didn't know it would kill Valentine too.' Modesty is my only weakness... There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man. The High Septon once told me that as we sin, so do we suffer. If that's true, Lord Eddard, tell me...why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones? I've always wanted to be the savior of humankind. You know, the thing that's always amazed me about illegals - including myself, of course - is the amount of ingenuity we're willing to expend so that we can get ourselves into trouble. It's staggering. Hey, Liu, what's the difference between what you've seen and what you are? What I do know are these things. Love is mighty. Souls, once they touch, always save an imprint of one another. The sun rises and sets on my world and on his. And above all, anything is possible. Praise not the day until evening has come; a woman until she is burnt; a sword until it is tried; a maiden until she is married; ice until it has been crossed; beer until it has been drunk. Vot is the point of being an international Quidditch player if all the good-looking girls are taken? Good men don't need to become legends. They just do what's right anyway. If you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. Some people are defined by their job, or the damage they do, the children they have, the legacies they build, the way they see the world, or the way they trick the world into seeing them as other than they are. Ours by blood right, taken from us by treachery, but ours still, ours forever. You do not steal from the dragon, oh no. The dragon remembers. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! You do NOT kill Imperial Guards. Ever. You can bribe them, plead with them, reason with them; you don't fight them. If you do, there are two possible outcomes: either you lose, in which case you are dead; or you win, in which case you are dead. The Autarch, who in one body is a thousand. That is correct, but how few of us know it. I had no idea that goblins were so... flammable. The Church wants to ban everything. It gives them something to do with their priests. We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! Health hint for the traveler: Don't throw rocks at guys with guns. When you know not whereof you speak, your mouth is best used for chewing. We gotta go to the crappy town where I'm a hero! I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar. Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it. Rigged games are the easiest to beat. Gods die. Add when they truly die, they are unmourned, and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. ... A secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret that can ever be. This is the only country in the world that worries about what it is. The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are. You mean, you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword, and we'll try to kill each other like civilised people? 'Good night. Good work. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.' Every night for four years he said that to me. Get used to disappointment. As you wiiiisssshhhhh. Every decision you make can change the world. I look at you and I see a man because that's what men are capable of - I don't hunt for excuses because I don't like to think that that's how nasty we can get. We look at Sorry and we see reflections of ourselves. The original plan's been scrapped, since it was intended to get us all killed. I didn't like that part, so we'll do it my way and hopefully get out alive. Taking up the sword is the last act of desperate men. Mark my words and find yourself a more worthy dream. We all die, pawn, but what Herr Barent fails to see is that there is no reason for the world to survive us. You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin and our feeble University men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. The fox condemns the trap, not himself. Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man is it is, infinite. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Our lunatics were prophets once, and had a prophet's power. Never forget that, Netley. Indeed, it would be a pleasure to watch Louis XIV go about his work, if he were not the Antichrist. You are not welcome, Brother Daniel, you are a problem, an obstacle, and if I were not a pacifist I would beat you to death with a rock. My heart expands, You do that, but I'm telling you a car-sized starship will never catch on. I want something big and powerful around me when I go exploring the unknown. We are the dead. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. Manuscripts don't burn. Beautiful women have strange ways. You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow? - You are a toy! You are a child’s plaything - Thou art fair beyond description, Divine One. We are human, Father. As long as we hold onto that, there is always hope. No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences. No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions. Not even death. I see shoes It was a pair of shoes. How should we distinguish? What was an experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges between the three. We've hooked our fish. Out of Nirvana and into the lotus, he comes. Go peel bananas with your feet! What's truth anyway? Truth is what you make it. Who would think to look for the Buddha in a whorehouse? Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes. Submerge him in living again. It is only thus that he may be freed from the chains of God. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first we'll live. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Try not! Do, or do not. There is no try. Reassured and enlightened, I peacefully wandered along the bookshelves. After all, there're so many imaginary worlds! And I'm inclined to think that living there is way more interesting than in the real world. Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you? Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Stars to live by. Stars to steer by. Stars to die by. You mean they want to arrest me over the phone? Could be. I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm cornered. If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now. It's the wild color scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery? I don't really believe in magic. YOU WANT WAR, O MORTALS? THE IMMORTAL GODS WILL SHOW YOU WAR. - Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing? Did you ask her what she wanted? Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Survivors learn to adapt.
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