Quest for the White Witch

The antithesis of myself. No fervor in him, no greed for life, only his ruthless craving to possess, which took no pleasure in possession.

This much poison cannot pour in one’s ears without it will leave some trace.

I have seen women who thought they loved me look at me that way, and wolves which were hungry.

I woke in the dawn. The plains of the Wilderness were exploding into light. It was the first hour of day, one of the two most beautiful hours of the desert, where sunrise and sunset are the queen and king.

The plague came to be called Yellow Mantle. Men must name everything, as if, by giving it a name, they will decrease the nameless horror they experience.

Power is the wine after which all other wine is mud.

He said quietly, “I see a jackal running. His name is I remember.”

Destiny or gods or fortune—whatever one is pleased or innocent enough to call them—they seal men to their decree.

A tomb contains the dead, who are properly immobile and unspeaking. Though Masrians leave lamps for the ghosts, nobody expects they will be lighted.

“Some god must be laughing somewhere.”

“Some god is always laughing. That is, if you believe in them, which is surely enough to make them laugh.”

Nothing breaks more quickly than corroded steel.

Far too soon a man is in his grave, and how small are the hurricanes and mountains of his life—vengeance, love, might, and conquest—compared to that tiny heap of bone dust at its end.

Such is the civilizing effect of city life upon men. It kills the instincts and replaces them with extended noses.

I had a rare wine in my blood. Expiation was over, guilt washed out, terror canceled.

The grape of truth is often bitter, but not to taste it in its season would be to waste the vine.

I had made vows and to spare, but the present cannot be ruled forever by the past.

There is no swifter way to make an enemy of a woman. You may tell her she is a clod or a bitch; as long as you lust for her, it will be forgiven. But say she is the wonder of the world and show her cold loins, and she will hate you till the sun goes out.

Westward and inland there was a form of government, some prince or other sitting on his backside ordering this or that.

The absolute, as I had finally been shown, does not need the accompaniment of pipes and drums.

In the tales of many lands, the prophet goes forth into the wilderness, the waste of sand or snow, or aloft on the barren black mountain, and when he returns to the people his eyes are great and luminous, his face is altered; he tells them he has seen God. I will suppose that God, if He is anywhere, is to be found in men, the nugget of gold buried inside the mud. I will suppose, too, that the wilderness washes off for a moment, or forever, the mud and the clay. Perhaps, then, the returning prophet should not say, “I have seen God”; but rather, “I have seen myself.”

There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.

At that, I understood for sure I must not lose her, for the earth is not the earth without some light to see it by, and she was mine.

It is a phenomenon of such spots that any noise is encapsulated in this ringing stillness, and made strangely tiny, however loud. The shouts of bandits and the squeaks of fauna sound as if confined in bubbles, a symbol of their impermanence. Only the desert endures.

I found a glimmering brown skull in the snow. I could not tell if it was mortal or god, and there seemed a sobering moral in that.

“Why aid me?”

“God has moved me to help you. Or, if you prefer, it was my reasonless inclination to do so.”