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1 " Advice," Doña Vorchenza chuckled. " Advice. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage. "
2 " I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer. Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, " Created sick — Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn't ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I'm claimed and saved whether I wish it or not. And if I refuse the unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude. That is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away. "
3 " In death we vanquished enemies,In death, we slew our foes.Blood soaked rage engulfed our blades,When blood lust took its hold.–In death, a darkness troubled one,In death, concealed, undone.Deep in darkness dragons wait,When blood would set the sun.–In death, we glorified his name.In death, we saw too late,When drink, to him, we raised in praise,The dragon sealed his fate.–In death, we lived. In death, we fought.In death, we grew to hate.In death, the blackened wraith released,The blinded shade beneath.–In death, his darkened eyes grew dim.In death, his mind was lost within.With blackened eyes, he slew his kin,In death, we lost to him.–In death, I took up sword and slew.In death, the dragon’s wrath ensued.We had no choice. The dragon fumed.In death, he was consumed.–In death, our brother’s blood deplored,In death, our brother, did I gore,When I rose up and killed one more.His blood ensconced my sword.–From death, his mutterings are weak.From death, his voice, to me, it speaks.Entombed within my brother’s keep,Revived in death, he sleeps. "
― Angela B. Chrysler , Dolor and Shadow (Tales of the Drui #1)
4 " They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth. "
5 " Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud. "
― Victor Hugo
6 " In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world. "
― William Gay , The Long Home
7 " What did you bring me today? Delusional mutterings with a side of crazy? "
― Marissa Meyer , Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4)
