Contra Amatores Mundi Quotes

“We shivered amid the cold; we sweltered in the heat. Bruises painted us from nose to knee, blooming in purples and blacks and faded, aureate bursts. We tasted our own blood and our own sweat and the dust of the world, and all were themselves transmuted to a wine of sorts, a communion with the ironmost edge of the earth.”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

“night hallows the world. It cleaves from it the shameless shades of day and leaves in their place the beating heart of the earth. All things at night reveal themselves in light and shadow, in black and white, and so they reveal a truth of the world, which is that all we dwellers in it and of it are ourselves carven from the light and the dark and in us no other paints may muddy that hue. We are children of the bright moon and the black sky, and all the spaces betwixt, and the lonesome dark we see beyond is only our own soul’s thread unspooled. Prospero spoke no lies: in the silvered nights of yore, our forefathers hunted the great creatures of the weald and slew them and gnashed them down to their marrowbones and made of themselves the sovereign beasts of the earth, crowned in gore. We are still the children of those fathers, of those beasts.”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

“night hallows the world. It cleaves from it the shameless shades of day and leaves in their place the beating heart of the earth. All things at night reveal themselves in light and shadow, in black and white, and so they reveal a truth of the world, which is that all we dwellers in it and of it are ourselves carven from the light and the dark and in us no other paints may muddy that hue. We are children of the bright moon and the black sky, and all the spaces betwixt, and the lonesome dark we see beyond is only our own soul’s thread unspooled.”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

“Our teachers and troubadours stuffed our minds with the tales of our fathers - Aristotle and Arthur, Christ and Chretien. Our swordmasters swelled our thews with the steps and strikes of our fathers' fathers. Our thoughts tread again the paths first cut by our forebears' minds. Thus we hop and hew in the image of our fathers, and the fathers of our fathers. How might we then count ourselves new men, and not but shades of elder days, fleshed afresh in gaudy youth? Do we martyr ourselves upon knighthood's altar of our volition, or does some greater mind print its thumb upon us and so mold us into familar shape? What will lies within? What choice? Are we men, or the echoes of men, seeded once and springing forever from the same tired earth, watered forevermore by chivalry's iron unguent?”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy