— This smell... Lilacan...
— Gooseberrys...
— Why not kill them?
— Because then I am who they say I am.
Because I know that in order to unite two people, destiny is insufficient. Something more is necessary than destiny.
“Now you’re lying, Dandelion.’
‘Not lying, just embellishing, and there’s a difference.”
It’s impossible to repay something that has no price. Some say everything in the world–everything, with no exception–has a price. It’s not true. There are things with no price, things that are priceless. But you realise it belatedly: when you lose them, you lose them forever and nothing can get them back for you.
It is easy to kill with a bow, girl. How easy it is to release the bowstring and think, it is not I, not I, it is the arrow. The blood of that boy is not on my hands. The arrow killed him, not I. But the arrow does not dream anything in the night. May you dream nothing in the night either, blue-eyed dryad.
Today Evil acts according to rights–because it is entitled to. It acts according to peace treaties, because it was taken into consideration when the treaties were being written …
I could never resist the temptation of having a look at something that doesn't exist.
“Don’t you think” — he smiled — “that my lack of faith makes such a trance pointless?” “No, I don’t. And do you know why?” “No.” Nenneke leaned over and looked him in the eyes with a strange smile on her pale lips. “Because it would be the first proof I’ve ever heard of that a lack of faith has any kind of power at all.
People like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.
Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.
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