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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.