Seventh Son

Land was what they wanted, as if the mere ownership of dirt could turn a peasant into a squire.

The most evil creatures don’t desire the destruction of everything—they only desire to exploit it for themselves.

“You must be a prophet right enough,” said Alvin Junior, “cause I can’t understand a thing you said.”

A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him.

I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.

The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second.

That's the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own.

“I don’t hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.”

It's plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

“I was ordained,” said the preacher. “No one ordains artists. They ordain themselves.”

Just as Taleswapper had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter.

The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.

It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.

It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit.

Just because you believe it doesn’t make it so.

“I've done my best, but the boy is unteachable. He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science.”

“In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.”

“He is unwilling to accept the idea that some things remain mysteries, comprehensible only to the mind of God. Ambiguity makes him saucy, and paradox causes open rebellion.”

“An obnoxious child.”

Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell.

A duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.

Religion makes them crazy. Not a woman I ever met wasn't crazy with religion.