The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

No longer is anyone astonished by the magical phenomena and mysterious occurrences that accompany the eight dates, in particular the Equinoxes and Solstices.

A world in which a deceptive appearance dons the mask of truth to pull the wool over the eyes of another truth—a false one, incidentally, which also tries to deceive.

“Nothing is as it seems,”

The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.”

They are not demons, not devils… Worse than that. They are people.

The mule was called Draakul. It was so named by Regis immediately after being stolen and so it remained. Regis was clearly entertained by the name, which no doubt had some amusing significance in the culture and speech of vampires, but which he did not wish to explain to us, claiming it was an untranslatable pun.

He named it Dracula ☠️

The conclusion thus being that the most effective defence against intellectual domination is roundly to affront the domineering intellectual.

Brooding achieves nothing, save distress, which clearly does you no good.

for though the Dank Wilderness was so dank it would have been difficult to imagine anything danker,

it is better to go forward without an aim than loiter without an aim, and with surety much better than to retreat without an aim.

Verily, great self-righteousness and great blindness are needed to call the gore pouring from the scaffold justice.

“And as regards haste,” he added philosophically, “the impression that time is quickly running out is customarily a warning signal enjoining one to reduce the pace, and proceed slowly and with due prudence.”

For the law is not jurisprudence, not a weighty tome full of articles, not philosophical treatises, not peevish nonsense about justice, not hackneyed platitudes about morality and ethics. The law means safe paths and highways. It means backstreets one can walk along even after sundown.

For, after all, the result of all great crackdowns on miscreants is always that the miscreants enter the ranks of the guardians of public order en masse. Your vision is a world of bribery, blackmail and entrapment, a world of turning imperial evidence and false witnesses. A world of snoopers and coerced confessions. Informing and the fear of being informed upon. And inevitably the day will come in your world when the flesh of the wrong person will be torn with pincers, when an innocent person is hanged or impaled. And then it will be a world of crime.

Ciri stroked the black cat, which had returned to the cottage in the swamp, as is customary with all cats in the world, when its love of freedom and dissolution had been undermined by cold, hunger and discomfort.

another miner, shooing away children who—as is the immemorial custom of all the world’s children—had appeared from nowhere to watch and get in the way.

There were certain things that simply didn’t change.

Knowledge, my dear, is a privilege, and privileges are only shared with one’s equals.

It’s impossible to utterly destroy humans and cockroaches; at least one pair always remains.

Screaminggggg

The Swallow, the symbol of spring, is the saviour, the one who will open the Forbidden Door, signal the way of salvation. And make possible the world’s rebirth. The Swallow, the Child of the Elder Blood.”

Human survivors, come from another world, from your former world, which you managed utterly to destroy with your still-hirsute hands, barely five million years after evolving as a species. There’s only a handful of you, your life expectancy is ridiculously low, so your survival depends on the pace of reproduction. Thus unbridled lust never leaves you, sex totally governs you; it’s a drive more powerful even than the survival instinct. To die? Why not, if one can fuck around beforehand. That is your entire philosophy.”

“Elves, bored by she-elves, court the always-willing human females. Bored she-elves give themselves, out of perverse curiosity, to human males, always full of vigour and verve. And something happens that no one can explain: she-elves, who normally ovulate once every ten or twenty years, when copulating with a man begin to ovulate with each powerful orgasm. Some hidden hormone, or combination of hormones, became active. She-elves suddenly understand they can, in practice, only have children with humans. So, owing to the she-elves, we didn’t exterminate you when we were still the more powerful race. And later you were more powerful and began to exterminate us.

“I’m no longer a witcher. I’ve stopped being a witcher. I’ve learned that now.

In Redania and Kaedwen, rather than “go to Hell” people said “get to Poviss.”

If anyone doesn’t like the old order, “the road’s open to Kovir”!

The sea is free and open. Trade is free. Profit is sacred. Love the trade and profit of your neighbour like your own. To hinder someone’s trading and profiting is to break the laws of nature.

Treaties are like marriage: they aren’t entered in to with the thought of betrayal, and once they’re concluded one shouldn’t be suspicious. And if that doesn’t suit somebody, they shouldn’t get married. Because you can’t become a cuckold without being a husband, but you’ll admit that fear of wearing the horns is a pitiful and quite ridiculous justification for enforced celibacy. And cuckolds aren’t a subject for discussion in a marriage. As long as one doesn’t wear horns, that subject isn’t mentioned, and if one’s already wearing them, then there’s nothing to say.

when gazing on a dream, one either sees great wisdom or great foolishness. The art is in recognising it.”

‘to give is a greater happiness than to receive, and supporting a pauper with alms is noble.’

“teach me, master, how I am to act. For my neighbour is desirous of my favourite dog. If I give him my pet, my heart will break from sorrow. If, though, I do not give it, I shall be downhearted, for I shall pain my neighbour through my refusal. What to do?” “Do you have,” asked the prophet, “something you love less than your pet dog?” “I have, master,” the pupil replied, “an impish cat, a tiresome pest. And I love him not at all.” And thus spake the prophet Lebioda: “Take that impish cat, that tiresome pest, and give it to your neighbour. Then you will know happiness. You will be rid of the cat, and will delight your neighbour. For most often it is so, that our neighbour does not desire a gift, but to be given.”’”

“Yennefer of Vengerberg,” Esterad said slowly, “was not a traitor. She was not an accomplice of Vilgefortz.

“It’s easier to stab a king than a spy.

‘On the way to eternity everyone will tread their own stairway, shouldering their own burden.’

The point is not the bearing of suffering. The point is how it is borne.”

“I’m just a legend,” she said bitterly. “Have been since my birth. Zireael, the Swallow, the Unexpected Child. The Chosen One. The Child of Destiny. The Child of the Elder Blood.

Do you know what learning gives you? The ability to make use of sources.”