The Wind's Twelve Quarters Quotes

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

I don't know. We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I. Now--for a breath I tarry Nor yet disperse apart-- Take my hand quick and tell me, What have you in your heart. Speak now, and I will answer; How shall I help you, say; Ere to the wind's twelve quarters I take my endless way.

This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home.