The Time of Contempt (The Witcher #2)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

An enchantress always takes action. Wrongly or rightly; that is revealed later. But you should act, be brave, seize life by the scruff of the neck. Believe me, little one, you should only regret inactivity, indecisiveness, hesitation. You shouldn’t regret actions or decisions, even if they occasionally end in sadness and regret.

We know little about love. Love is like a pear. A pear is sweet and has a distinct shape. Try to define the shape of a pear. Dandelion, Half a Century of Poetry

He continued to complain. He simply felt like moaning.

After the compulsory air kisses or unpleasantly weak handshakes, after the insincere smiles and even less sincere, although well-concocted, compliments, followed a brief and tediously banal conversation about nothing.

The landscape depicts the meeting between Cregennan of Lod and Lara Dorren aep Shiadhal, the legendary lovers, torn apart and destroyed by the time of contempt. He was a sorcerer and she was an elf, one of the elite of Aen Saevherne, or the Knowing Ones. What might have been the beginning of reconciliation was transformed into tragedy.”

“It’s incredible,” the Witcher smiled hideously, “how much my neutrality outrages everybody. How it makes me subject to offers of pacts and agreements, offers of collaboration, lectures about the necessity to make choices and join the right side.

But do you know when stories stop being stories? The moment someone begins to believe in them.

Had it not been for the foolish scruples of the Witcher, and his impractical principles, many subsequent events would have run their course quite differently. Many events would probably have not taken place at all. And the history of the world would have unfolded in an alternative way.

“I love you, my daughter,” she said indistinctly. “Run.”

“A coward,” he declared with dignity, when he’d stopped coughing and had got his breath back, “dies a hundred times. A brave man dies but once. But Dame Fortune favours the brave and holds cowards in contempt.”

“The hero gazed on the maelstrom,” he quietly declaimed, trying not to let his teeth chatter. “He gazed on it and travelled on, for his heart knew not trepidation.”