The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Something has ended in me, Cahir. Something has burned out. Something has ruptured in me…” “Never mind, Geralt. I shall dream for both of us.”

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

I, Yennefer of Vengerberg, regard Ciri as my daughter. Which is why I demand on her behalf that you keep your vow.