The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

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.

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.

And then suddenly comes the Conjunction of the Spheres and you, people, appear here. 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.

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

“Yes, O hermit. That’s how you fight Evil! If Evil wants to do you harm, inflict pain on you—anticipate it, ideally when Evil isn’t expecting it. If, though, you didn’t manage to anticipate Evil, if you were harmed by Evil, then pay it back! Catch it, ideally when it has forgotten, when it feels safe. Pay it back twofold. Threefold. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All its teeth for a tooth! Pay Evil back! Make it howl with pain, so its eyeballs burst from its howling. And then, looking down at the floor, you may confidently say: what’s lying there won’t harm anybody any longer, it won’t threaten anyone. For how can it threaten anyone without any eyes? If it has no hands? How can it do any harm when its guts are trailing over the sand, and the gore is soaking into it?”

Farewell, Ciri. Farewell, Swallow. “Farewell, Old Raven.”