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I think it improper to talk about evil all during a meal. It spoils the digestion."
"Oh, but come," the Witch said, "is it only in youth that we can have the nerve to as, ourselves such serious questions?'
"Well, I stick with my suggestion," said Avaric. "Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavior. First of all -"
"Institutional inertia," claimed the Witch. "But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?"
"That's why I say it's merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed," said a copper magnate. "And we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible."
"It's an absence of good, that's all," said his paramour, an agony aunt for the Shiz informer. "The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace."
"Pigspittle," said Avaric. "Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn't progress..."
"I think it's a presence, not an absence," said an artist. "Evil's an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It's an other. It's not us."
"Not even me?" said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. "A self-confessed murderer?"
"Oh go on with you," said the artist, "we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That's just normal vanity."
"Evil isn't a thing, it's not a person, it's an attribute like beauty..."
"It's a power, like wind..."
"It's an infection..."
"It's metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation -"
"Blame it on the Unnamed God, then."
"But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?"
"it's not of air and eternity, evil isn't; it's of earth; it's physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing on another pain, no more no less -"
"I like pain, if I'm wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me -"
"No, you're all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart - the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend no to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience -"
"Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.
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Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1))