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February 1 - February 13, 2025
I wouldn’t mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don’t know the way out.”
The Wizard’s right to impose unjust laws may be better challenged if we know how the old codgers explained it to themselves.”
The Animals are recalled to the lands of their ancestors, a ploy to give the farmers a sense of control over something anyway. It’s a systematic marginalizing of populations, Glinda, that’s what the Wizard’s all about.”
On her face was a look of gray submission to impossible reality.
He saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn’t work together to hold everyone by the neck.
The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.
Stay out of the Wind until the time is right or you’ll be blown in the wrong direction.”
Setting communities on edge, ethnic groups against one another, bankers against farmers and factories against shopkeepers. Oz is a seething volcano threatening to erupt and burn us in its own poisonous pus.
“I never use the words humanist or humanitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”
“They march in those boots all over the poor and the weak. They terrify households at three in the morning and drag away dissenters—and break up printing presses with their axes—and hold mock trials for treason at midnight and executions at dawn. They rake over every quarter of this beautiful, false city. They harvest a crop of victims on a monthly basis. It’s government by terror.
“I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.
“Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction.
Work together, Fiyero found himself thinking, hardly aware he could have such a thought. Work as a team—there are twelve of you and only one of him. Is it your differences from one another that keep you docile?
There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.
“To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”
Elphie thought: Such silly things, children—and so embarrassing—because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”
Now I just think it’s our own lives that are hidden from us. The mystery—who is that person in the mirror—that’s shocking and unfathomable enough for me.”
Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.
People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
