67
" At the root of the tree at the heart of the world,
With a chain round his neck, the Wolf lies curled.
His gleaming teeth and jaws are furled,
And the sun shall rise in the morning.
His chain, it is forged of the nerve of a bear,
Of the voice of a fish, and a girl's chin-hair.
His chain, it is light and strong and fair,
And the sun shall rise in the morning.
With a mountain's root, and a cat's foot-fall,
And the spit of a bird, he is held in thrall,
Though iron could bind him never at all,
And the sun shall rise in the morning.
The sun shall rise, the stars shall fade,
For the binding which the good gods made
Still loops the Wolf in its lovely braid,
And the sun shall rise in the morning. "
― , Jesse's Story (The Slave Breakers, #2)
70
" Gawain laid his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Sir Perceval, when the priest reads the lesson, he says that he who would save his life must lose it. Good words for any man, for there are moments when cowardice will bring death more surely than boldness. But the ordinary man knows, when he goes out to meet the wolf in his road, that he may yet come home in peace. Not so the knights of the Round Table. We win through one deadly peril only to face another. If we banish one evil, we must go on to the next and after that, to the next—until death meets us in the path. We yield up our bodies every day, not for glory and fortune but so that those weaker than ourselves may live. Do you understand?”
“I do,” said Sir Perceval. “And I say that there is no nobler calling. I am content.” But then he thought of the Lady Blanchefleur kissing his brow on a night of fire and blood, and with a sudden ache of grief told himself that even a hundred years of peace would not be enough time to spend with her. "
― Suzannah Rowntree , Pendragon's Heir
71
" There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. "
― Hermann Hesse , Steppenwolf