15 quotes
It is far easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
You mean I’ve come all this way to kill a man, and you tell me he’s gone?
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
“So,” said Raven, “once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.”
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
But then, our way is the natural way ordained by god herself, whereas I have no idea whose set of social accidents and economic anomalies have contoured the ways of your odd and awkward land.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose—for a while—under the night.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Gorgik began to learn that most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with the pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
And of course that is the problem with all truly powerful ideas. And what we have been talking of is certainly that. What it produces is illuminated by it. But applied where it does not pertain, it produces distortions as terrifying as the idea was powerful.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
While any situation could be used as an image of any other, no thing could be an image of another—especially two things as complicated as two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and delude oneself—that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!”
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket—not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
What I’ve observed—the pattern behind what I’ve observed—explains why what happens happens the way it does. It makes the whole process easier to see. Your idea is a possible explanation not of the observations but of a set of speculations, which, if you accepted them along with the explanation, would then only make you start seeing things and half-things where no things are.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)