The Claw Of The Conciliator

Quotes

1. Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. [...] Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of a delightful character. Some will say they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have "recovered" from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.

2. 

   Women believe—or at least often pretend to believe—that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.

3. 

   Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

4. 

   Dorcas drew back. “Magic, you mean?”

   “There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”

5. 

   In silence two praetorians (four fluttering sparrows, as it seemed) caught our destriers and led them away. How like us those animals were, walking patiently they knew not where, their massive heads following thin strips of leather. Nine-tenths of life, so it seems to me, consists of these surrenders.

6. 

   I am much older than you are. Older than you think. If there is one thing I have learned in so many voyages, it is that the dead do not rise, nor the years turn back. What has been and is gone does not come again.

7. 

   There is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after.

8. 

   We try to keep the traders honest that come to our fairs. It’s only good business. If he doesn’t make them right for you, whoever he is, we’ll duck him in the river, you may be sure. One or two ducked a year keep the rest from feeling too comfortable.

9. 

   Those who wish no change may sit hugging their scruples forever.

10. 

    Myself, I don’t believe—or rather, I think that if the Pancreator don’t care nothing for me, I won’t care nothing for him, and why should I?

11. 

    All the boasted human panoply of pillars and arches is no more than an imitation in sterile stone of the boles and vaulting branches of the forest.

12. 

    I have often heard it said that gratitude is not to be found. That is not true—those who say so have always looked in the mistaken place. One who truly benefits another is for that moment at a level with the Pancreator, and in gratitude for that elevation will serve the other all his days.

13. 

    I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thoughts I forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself for not. By that mood, as I think, I did live; it has been so good a friend to me that I have endeavored to wear it ever since, succeeding not always, but often.

14. 

    That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

15. 

    We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters.

16. 

    He had a slightly cynical detachment from mankind that suggested he had seen a great deal of the world.

That’s all the quotes.

16 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more