Magic Tavern Quotes

Aren't you afraid of dying?" he asked Lila now. She looked at him as if it were a strange question. And then she shook her head. "Death comes for everyone," she said simply. "I'm not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here." She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. "I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still.

He listened to the shhk of metal sliding home, then turned to find Lila waiting, her back purposely to the tavern, as if her present were already her past.

A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves.

Magic is the first sip of good wine that makes the edges of your vision blur. Magic is the cool breeze of the boardwalk at night and organ music in the air. Magic is landing a grand jeté and nearly going deaf with hate crowd's applause. Magic is the low flicker of tavern lights and the girl your courting leaning close so you can kiss.

On the Greek island of Hydra there are no cars. You have to travel by donkey or walk. If you go up the hill from the harbor and walk the ancient paved pathways you will enter a square of sorts and find a tavern called Douskos. If you sit there under the tree, pick up a battered guitar and sing sweetly to the cat, they will kick you out. They’ve had enough of that sort of thing already at Douskos. Stop there if you can. I did. I had to. Leonard and Joni wanted some private time.

Vegard and Riston's job today was to guard and protect me. And considering that I was in a tower room in the Guardians' citadel, it looked like a pretty plum assignment. I mean, how much trouble could a girl get into under heavy guard in a tower room? Notice I didn't ask that question out loud. No need to rub Fate's nose in something when I'd been tempting her enough lately. Phaelan had generously his guard services as well, just in case something happened to me that my Guardian bodyguards couldn't handle. Phaelan's guard-on-duty stance resembled his pirate-on-shore-leave stane of leaning back in a chair with his feet up, but instead of a tavern table, his boots were doing a fine job of holding down the windowsill. I don't know how I'd ever felt safe without him.

He was sitting in the back of the booth, and Lila on the outside edge, as far from him as possible. She couldn't shake the feeling he was watching her beneath that brimmed cap, even though every time she checked, his attention was leveled on the tavern behind her head. His fingers traced absent pattern in a pool of spilled ale, but his green eye twitched in concentration. It took her several long seconds to realize he was counting bodies in the room. "Nineteen," she said coolly, and Alucard and Kell both looked at her as if she'd spoken out of turn, but Holland simply answered, "Twenty," and despite herself, Lila swiveled in her seat. She did a swift count. He was right. She'd missed on e of the men behind the bar. Dammit. "If you have to use your eyes," he added, "you're doing it wrong.

Death comes for everyone,” she said simply. “I’m not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here.” She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. “I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.

her back purposely to the tavern, as if her present were already her past.

I’m not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here.” She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. “I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.

Lila swore under her breath. No wonder the men had been welcome in that tavern with the compass. They were proper sailors.

Death comes for everyone," she said simply. "I'm not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here." She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. "I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still.

In my travels on the surface, I once met a man who wore his religious beliefs like a badge of honor upon the sleeves of his tunic. "I am a Gondsman!" he proudly told me as we sat beside eachother at a tavern bar, I sipping my wind, and he, I fear, partaking a bit too much of his more potent drink. He went on to explain the premise of his religion, his very reason for being, that all things were based in science, in mechanics and in discovery. He even asked if he could take a piece of my flesh, that he might study it to determine why the skin of the drow elf is black. "What element is missing," he wondered, "that makes your race different from your surface kin?" I think that the Gondsman honestly believed his claim that if he could merely find the various elements that comprised the drow skin, he might affect a change in that pigmentation to make the dark elves more akin to their surface relatives. And, given his devotion, almost fanaticism, it seemed to me as if he felt he could affect a change in more than physical appearance. Because, in his view of the world, all things could be so explained and corrected. How could i even begin to enlighten him to the complexity? How could i show him the variations between drow and surface elf in the very view of the world resulting from eons of walking widely disparate roads? To a Gondsman fanatic, everything can be broken down, taken apart and put back together. Even a wizard's magic might be no more than a way of conveying universal energies - and that, too, might one day be replicated. My Gondsman companion promised me that he and his fellow inventor priests would one day replicate every spell in any wizard's repertoire, using natural elements in the proper combinations. But there was no mention of the discipline any wizard must attain as he perfects his craft. There was no mention of the fact that powerful wizardly magic is not given to anyone, but rather, is earned, day by day, year by year and decade by decade. It is a lifelong pursuit with gradual increase in power, as mystical as it is secular. So it is with the warrior. The Gondsman spoke of some weapon called an arquebus, a tubular missile thrower with many times the power of the strongest crossbow. Such a weapon strikes terror into the heart of the true warrior, and not because he fears that he will fall victim to it, or even that he fears it will one day replace him. Such weapons offend because the true warrior understands that while one is learning how to use a sword, one should also be learning why and when to use a sword. To grant the power of a weapon master to anyone at all, without effort, without training and proof that the lessons have taken hold, is to deny the responsibility that comes with such power. Of course, there are wizards and warriors who perfect their craft without learning the level of emotional discipline to accompany it, and certainly there are those who attain great prowess in either profession to the detriment of all the world - Artemis Entreri seems a perfect example - but these individuals are, thankfully, rare, and mostly because their emotional lacking will be revealed early in their careers, and it often brings about a fairly abrupt downfall. But if the Gondsman has his way, if his errant view of paradise should come to fruition, then all the years of training will mean little. Any fool could pick up an arquebus or some other powerful weapon and summarily destroy a skilled warrior. Or any child could utilize a Gondsman's magic machine and replicate a firebal, perhaps, and burn down half a city. When I pointed out some of my fears to the Gondsman, he seemed shocked - not at the devastating possibilities, but rather, at my, as he put it, arrogance. "The inventions of the priests of Gond will make all equal!" he declared. "We will lift up the lowly peasant

Careful now,” said Barron when she reached the tavern steps. She hadn’t heard him come out. “Someone might think you’ve got a heart under all that brass.” “No heart,” said Lila, pulling aside her cloak to reveal the holstered pistol and one of her knives. “Just these.

The Hollow's tavern was just as welcoming as the rest of the curious inn, with lots of wood and candles and one wall of windows that looked out on a lake, which appeared as if it were full of stars instead of water. It was all glitter and night-glimmer, and she was already wondering what it would look like in the day.

This is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don't know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you've got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you're satisfied with a fisherman's life in Cabrillo. Not that a fisherman's life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there? And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn't have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that's why there happened to him - what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working. ("Before I Wake...")

He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how. I helped him. Then he asked me, straight out, ‘What would you say was the true centre of Paris?’ I was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, ‘The starting point of France’s roads . . . the brass plate on the parvis of Notre-Dame.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘Do you take for me a sap?’ The centre of Paris, a spiral with four centres, each completely self-contained, independent of the other three. But you don’t reveal this to just anybody. I suppose - I hope - it was in complete good faith that Alexandre Arnoux mentioned the lamp behind the apse of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois. I wouldn’t have created that precedent. My turn now to let the children play with the lock. ‘The centre, as you must be thinking of it, is the well of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. The “Well of Truth” as it’s been known since the eleventh century.’ He was delighted. I’d delivered. He said, ‘You know, you and I could do great things together. It’s a pity I’m already “beyond redemption”, even at this very moment.’ His unhibited display of brotherly affection was of childlike spontaneity. But he was still pursuing his line of thought: he dashed out to the nearby stationery shop and came back with a little basic pair of compasses made of tin. ‘Look. The Vieux-Chene, the Well. The Well, the Arbre-a-Liege On either side of the Seine, adhering closely to the line he’d drawn, the age-old tavern signs were at pretty much the same distance from the magic well. ‘Well, now, you see, it’s always been the case that whenever something bad happens at the Vieux-Chene, a month later — a lunar month, that is, just twenty-eight days — the same thing happens at old La Frite’s place, but less serious. A kind of repeat performance. An echo Then he listed, and pointed out on the map, the most notable of those key sites whose power he or his friends had experienced. In conclusion he said, ‘I’m the biggest swindler there is, I’m prepared to be swindled myself, that’s fair enough. But not just anywhere. There are places where, if you lie, or think ill, it’s Paris you disrespect. And that upsets me. That’s when I lose my cool: I hit back. It’s as if that’s what I was there for.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

scolding look. ‘Mistress Celia and her companion only arrived home a few minutes before

of the air-conditioned Faulk Street Tavern. It’s there that high school teacher Meredith Benoit finds him. Due to a silly prank, her job and her reputation are in jeopardy. She needs a lawyer, fast. But the Magic

I take to slummy bars and sheisty gambling halls like a proud lion to the rolling grassy plains of the savannah. Well acquainted, am I, with the various beasts of the beer-tavern. The cackling hyena pool players—scavengers, lurking in the shadows, waiting to prey upon the unwary sucker. The sports-betting meerkat folk who poke heads out of their beer mug homes only long enough to check scores, before ducking back down in a bid to avoid the larger predators. The aloof but noble baboon bartender, dispensing suds and barroom wisdom in equal portions—kind of like Rafiki from the Lion King, sans the beer thing.

Baltsaros, what have you done? he thought weakly. Run and find me. Run and find me. Run. Jon felt dizzy, the two images of the captain overlapping: one charming and gentle, the other a blood-thirsty murderer. He let out a slow breath, his pulse thrumming in his ears. The monster holding his arms stared at him while the seconds ticked by. Baltsaros was crazy. Tom knew it and had hid the captain’s insanity from him. Jon had to get away, now. Before it was too late. Before Baltsaros finished the job he had started the night they passed the spires. Before he went crazy himself. He had to go. Had to. Jon didn’t move. He simply closed his eyes. The captain loosened his grip on Jon’s arms, and his fingers stroked Jon’s skin softly. He turned Jon’s forearms in his hands and laughed quietly. Jon let out a small gasp as the captain ran a fingertip along the fresh knife wound. “I’m not crazy, Jon,” whispered Baltsaros. The captain touched the healed scar on the inside of Jon’s other forearm, the one that had been made in a tiny room above a tavern half a world away. “You believe in blood magic too, after all.” Jon’s eyes snapped open, and he growled at Baltsaros. “Don’t you dare equate the pact we made with your damned perversions.” He yanked his arms out of Baltsaros’s grasp and pulled himself backwards on the bed.

Martoglio indeed expressed the varied aspects of Sicilian life. He sang about many things and always with freshness, ingenuity, inventiveness and truth: he sang of macho Catanese men who live in taverns where the light of the sun never shines and who speak a jargon so obscure that only God and Martoglio could fathom, of people in the rough Civita neighborhood where he recorded the imaginative insults of neighborhood women whose linguistic skills display the astuteness and subtlety of a master politician; he captured with uncanny subtlety the skillful verbal exchanges between two partners playing “briscula” and painted vignettes—“tranches de vie”— like the sonnet “A Cira,” which Pirandello rightly considered a little masterpiece in which one word, one gesture orone look magically discloses a world of complex motivations and emotions.

Cuando los diseñadores desarrollaban la Liberty Tree Tavern, Walt Disney les dijo que había un solo concepto básico: "quiero que las personas vayan a un edificio de cinco millones de dólares a comprar hamburguesas de cinco centavos". Desde aquel día, el precio de las hamburguesas ha aumentado considerablemente, pero la premisa de proporcionar un gran valor sigue allí.

The Company knew all about poisons.

It seemed that some part of my battling soul remained my own. For slowly, as if I was wading through soft, wet, sucking sand, I began to fight back. I threw myself against the fear, forcing it into submission. And as a small amount of daylight cleared amid the blackness, I recognized this for what it was. I’d just been attacked. And instantly reason returned.

it struck me with the force of certainty that I wasn’t the only one of us to be affected this way: that Theo was feeling it too, and this was why he was so cross. And Jonathan? Was he too infected with this deadly inertia? And where was it coming from?

somebody had tried to halt my probing, just as I’d been halted on the spot and held out of time, down in the crypt earlier this morning. As, the night after Francis Heron fell sick, I’d been assaulted by a horrific vision of beheading in a mirror that I was convinced had just crept up on me. I put down my quill. I realized I was sweating, and I felt, I actually felt like a physical presence, the moment of fear that demanded, Is it the pestilence? ‘It is not,’ I said, my voice quite calm. It was a very clever person playing with my mind. But this was where they would stop.

Then suddenly I wasn’t standing frozen in some dim and dank room hidden away at the back of an inn, I was thundering back along the twisting passages, Raphe Wymer forgotten, Francis Heron forgotten, magic mirrors, supernatural apparitions and strange, alarming visions forgotten, driven out by the one imperative thought forcing me on: find Celia and get her to safety.

I nodded. ‘Then let’s hope it’s destroyed.’ I was thinking – trying to think – but my head felt full of mist. ‘We must get out of here,’ I said suddenly. ‘It’s as if—’ I stopped, not wanting to put it into words. So Theo did. ‘As if someone’s controlling us,’ he said, his voice barely audible. ‘As if, whenever we think we’re on the brink of a discovery, somehow they know and they muddle our thoughts until it’s gone away.’ ‘I couldn’t have put it better,’ I murmured.

But all at once I realized that my feet were cold.’ I paused, for the alarming power of that moment was still uncomfortable, even in memory. ‘I looked at the candles in their lanterns, and the top third had burned away. Somebody, somehow, seemed to have put me into a trance.

A tavern brawl? Why didn't you wake me up?

I had the weird sensation that I had stepped through a veil, and passed unwittingly from one realm into another …