Way Of Wyrd Quotes

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It's the other way around.

Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

...there was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people's problems. It implied that, in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves.

Thoughts are like raindrops,’ he persisted, introducing yet another of his interminable images. ‘They fall, make a splash and then dry up. But the world of wyrd is like the mighty oceans from which raindrops arise and to which they return in rivers and streams.

You're- you're not going to force me to go back are you?" he said. "Um?" said the duke. He waved his hand irritably. "No, no," he said. "Not at all. Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time.

She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she'd smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all.

us to comprehend, for we are ourselves part of wyrd and cannot stand back to observe it as if it were a separate force.

You are labelling pieces of the world with words, then confusing your word-hoard for the totality of life.

she reflected that there was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people’s problems. It implied that, in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves.

I am a harmless old seller of apples," she said, in a voice more appropriate for the opening of hostilities in a middle-range war. "Pray let me past, dearie." The last word had knives in it. "No-one must enter the castle," said one of the guards. "Orders of the duke." Granny shrugged. The apple-seller gambit had never worked more than once in the entire history of witchcraft, as far as she knew, but it was traditional. "I know you, Champett Poldy," she said. "I recall I laid out your grandad and I brought you into the world." She glanced at the crowds, which had regathered a little way off, and turned back to the guard, whose face was already a mask of terror. She leaned a little closer, and said, "I gave you your first good hiding in this valley of tears and by all the gods if you cross me now I will give you your last." There was a soft metallic noise as the spear fell out of the man's fearful fingers. Granny reached and gave the trembling man a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "But don't worry about it," she added. "Have an apple.

There’s the problem, see. The more you get used to magic, the more you don’t want to use it. The more it gets in your way.

Nothing may happen without wyrd, for it is present in everything, but wyrd does not make things happen. Wyrd is created at every instant and so wyrd is the happening.

know the flow of the grain. The pattern of wyrd represented by this tree is visible in the grain and you must work within it.

That’s where you’ve been getting it all wrong,” said Granny. “Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.

Sussex wun't be druv! Old Sussex motto indicating that they are not very keen on 'foreign' ways outside the old county borders. Especially not the source of chuckle-headed rules: Lunnon.

The castle was full of people standing around in that polite, sheepish way affected by people who see each other all day and are now seeing each other again in unusual social circumstances, like an office party.

Everything that has happened took place because you arrived. If you had not come here, the warrior might still be alive and the horse might not have been sick. A man has been killed, and a horse healed, for your benefit.

Words can be potent magic indeed, but they can also enslave us. We grasp from wyrd tiny puffs of wind and store them in our lungs as words. But we have not thereby captured a piece of reality, to be pored over and examined as if it were a glimpse of

Each sorcerer has his own connections with the forces of wyrd. In the execution of the shapes subtleties, allusions and personal secrets are revealed. Once you have mastered the copying skill, you will develop your own style and in time your knife will

By the Wyrd!” Dorian laughed. “He’s trained you well already!” He nudged Chaol with his elbow. “From the way you two are blatantly ignoring me, I’d say she could pass for your sister! Though you don’t really look like each other—it would be hard to pass off someone so pretty as your sister.” Celaena was unable to keep a hint of a smile from her lips. Both she and the prince had grown up under strict, unforgiving fathers—well, father figure in her case. Arobynn had never replaced the father she’d lost, nor had he ever tried to. But at least Arobynn had an excuse for being equal parts tyrannical and doting. Why had the King of Adarlan let his son become anything but an identical copy of himself? “There!” Dorian said. “A reaction—thank the gods I’ve amused her.

But the threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but are locked in the soul. We can only discern the shadows

You are strangling your life-force with words. Do not live your life searching around for answers in your word-hoard. You will find only words to rationalize your experience. Allow yourself to open up to wyrd and it will cleanse, renew, change and develop your

Each rune is a complete representation of wyrd. Just as one drop of water reflects a perfect image of all that is around it, so each rune reflects the totality of wyrd. The rhythm of wyrd may be observed at all levels, whether it be the movement of the stars across the sky or the cutting of shapes into a patch of earth.

We kiss, and it’s better. Better than the last time, better than the first time. Better, always. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and I’m sure I’ll find it one day. Beneath Sigmund’s tongue, perhaps, or hiding in his hair. I’ll keep looking. I’ve got time; it’s a long way up to the penthouse, after all. When we reach it, there’ll be friends and allies, family, explanations. Fantales. One ruffled raven. And the first rays of dawn, exploring the remade world with all the wonder of a child. Welcome to the Golden Age. An old end, but a new beginning. Stick around. You’ll see.

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.

By the way,” he said, “exactly how does one quaff?” “I think it means you spill most of it,” said Hwel.

The One who ruled from the Beginning had twelve names: first Allfather, second Lord of Hosts, third Lord of the Spear, fourth Smiter, then All-Knowing, Fulfiller of Wishes, Farspoken, Shaker, Burner, Destroyer, Protector and Gelding. I know the significance of each of those names and each one takes a lifetime to tell. You shall learn them all.

The Way of Wyrd, Brian Bates (Arrow Books, 1983) This book burst upon the modern pagan world, re-establishing Saxon magic in its rightful place after a period of neglect. An Anglo-Saxon sorcerer inducts a Christian scribe into the pagan magical mindset, via experiences of a multilayered world of ceremony and ritual shared with spirits and elves, where every event in the natural world might be either a messenger or a threat.

it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at

The word the Anglo-Saxon poets of Dark Age England used for fate highlights this ironic, circling, swerving logic; they called it wyrd—a word related to a lot of other w-r words still existing in our language that connote twisting and turning (worm, wrap, writhe, wreath, wring, and so on—even word, which, as writers know, is made of bendy-twisty marks on paper or stone). Wyrd, or weird, is the bending force in our lives that, among other things, causes dark prophecies to be fulfilled not only despite but actually because of our best efforts at preventing them. It also warps our mind and induces a kind of compulsion around more appealing-sounding prophecies, as it did to Shakespeare’s Macbeth after hearing the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that he would become king. When we realize that the Minkowski block universe, in its resolute self-consistency, imposes a wyrd-like law upon us (a “law in the cosmos,” you might call it), then all those antique myths about prophecy and the ironic insistency of fate start to appear less like the superstitions of benighted folk in the Back When and start to seem remarkably, well, prescient. And not only prescient, but based on real-life experience with prescience. Divination was an important part of Greek culture, for instance; it was even the basis of their medicine. Sick patients went to temples and caves to have healing dreams in the presence of priests who could interpret their dreams’ signs. They were not strangers to this stuff, as we now are. As intrinsically precognitive beings who think of ourselves as freely willed, the logic of wyrd is our ruler. We can’t go anywhere that would prevent ourselves from existing, prevent ourselves from getting to the experiences and realizations ahead of us that will turn out to have retroinfluenced our lives now, and this imposes a kind of blindness on us. That blindness may keep us from going insane, reducing the level of prophecy to a manageable level. It is why our dreamlife only shows us the future as through a glass, darkly. It is also why the world seems so tricksterish to those who are really paying attention. That we are interfered with by an intelligence that is somehow within us but also Other is the human intuition that Freud theorized in such a radical new way. His focus was on how this Other inside could make us ill; the flip side is that it really does serve as our guide, especially when we let ourselves be led by our unreason. Research shows that “psi” is an unconscious, un-willed function or group of functions.2 The laboratory experiments by Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, and many others strongly support something like presentiment (future-feeling) operating outside of conscious awareness, and it could be a pervasive feature or even a basic underlying principle of our psychology.

Plants carry life-force as potent as any person. To take the life of a plant, whether for food or sorcery, is to act with the gods.

Only in the entire history of witchery in the Ramtops, had a thief broken into a witch's cottage. The witch concerned visited the most terrible punishment on him: She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she'd smile a in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact, he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.

Just keep breathing. The only way out is through. If you don’t let yourself feel all of it, you’re only delaying the inevitable.

She weighed the crown in her hands. It felt very heavy, in a way that went beyond mere pounds and ounces.

She was the light of the world, their guide and way, weigher of wyrd. They wanted to be close, to breathe her air, to be inside her light and her wyrd shield.

I see a boy. Ah, he is beautiful, and he has the way of wyrd within him.

In time, all fortunes part ways.

An abrupt demise can only be undone through abrupt means. When a rodent finds itself stuck in a glue trap, every instinct urges it to scream. Life finds ways to relent, raging against a quiet night, just as the winds will always continue to howl.

The darkness offered no comfort. It only shrouded the true nature of that place. It hid the mocking and gloating eyes of the unseen. The cold, dank air chilled everything in the room and had long since seeped into the very marrow of the girl’s bones. It gave no relief and only aggravated the already sore skin around her wrists and ankles. The skin that had been rubbed raw by the manacles that bit into them. The manacles that kept her chained to the stone slab on which she was forced to lie. The girl did not know how long she had been there, nor where ‘there’ was. All that she knew was that she had been forsaken, and that there were only two ways she would ever see the outside of that room again, and neither of them were desirable.

All those who would understand the ways of wyrd must tread this path. You must strengthen the light within you, for once it burns brightly, it will illumine your way forever. There is already a tiny flame within your heart. The same flame burns within every human breast. Can you feel it? Can you see it with your inner eye?

Maycarpe was aware that his eyes had become wet. He had worked so hard for this, risking his life and his sanity, yet he would always be part of the shadows. Not for him the long gracious walk to the altar where the prize of all prizes, the crown of divine kingship, would be placed upon his head. Not for him the joyous tears and laughter of an entire nation. He was one of the spiders on the web of wyrd. He could devour what became emeshed in his deadly silk, or he could choose to release those bright beautiful dragonflies that were too precious to die. But no one knew that. The people outside today wouldn’t look twice at him, he was nothing more than an adminstrative clerk of the government, who when the coronation party was over, would go home alone to his modest apartment in the palace.

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the make-up table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet . . . and yet . . . Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from – hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

She’d never even heard of a suit like this. It would completely change the way she conducted her missions. Not that she needed the suit to give her an edge. But she was Celaena Sardothien, gods be damned, so didn’t she deserve the very best equipment? With this suit, no one would question her place as Adarlan’s Assassin. Ever. And if they did … Wyrd help them.

Granny considered herself something of an expert on minds. She was pretty certain things like countries didn’t have minds. They weren’t even alive, for goodness sake. A country was, well, was— Hold on. Hold on . . . A thought stole gently into Granny’s mind and sheepishly tried to attract her attention. There was a way in which those brooding forests could have a mind. Granny sat up, a piece of antique loaf in her hand, and gazed speculatively at the fireplace. Her mind’s eye looked through it, out at the snow-filled aisles of trees. Yes. It had never occurred to her before. Of course, it’d be a mind made up of all the other little minds inside it; plant minds, bird minds, bear minds, even the great slow minds of the trees themselves . . . She sat down in her rocking chair, which started to rock all by itself. She’d often thought of the forest as a sprawling creature, but only metterforically, as a wizard would put it; drowsy and purring with bumblebees in the summer, roaring and raging in autumn gales, curled in on itself and sleeping in the winter. It occurred to her that in addition to being a collection of other things, the forest was a thing in itself. Alive, only not alive in the way that, say, a shrew was alive. And much slower. That would have to be important. How fast did a forest’s heart beat? Once a year, maybe. Yes, that sounded about right. Out there the forest was waiting for the brighter sun and longer days that would pump a million gallons of sap several hundred feet into the sky in one great systolic thump too big and loud to be heard. And it was at about this point that Granny bit her lip. She’d just thought the word “systolic,” and it certainly wasn’t in her vocabulary. Somebody was inside her head with her. Some thing.

His voice came from a long way off, from wherever his mind was now. The company stared at him wordlessly. It wasn’t possible to hate someone like this, only to feel acutely embarrassed about being anywhere near him.

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.” “Bugger destiny,” agreed Nanny.

No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.