Sign of the Unicorn Quotes

“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“While sex heads a great number of lists, we all have other things we like to do in between.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Yes,” he said. “But I wonder . . . I’ve a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out.”

“I can appreciate the feeling,” I said. “My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author. But look at it this way: inside stories seldom live up to one’s expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Before you are fully aware of anything else, you are aware whether you are awakening in your own bed.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“And again, damn. Of troubles I considered myself amply possessed. But those who have do seem to get. Some spiritual form of compound interest, I suppose.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Life's incessant ceremonies leap everlasting, humans spring eternal on hope's breast, and frying pans without fires are often few and far between.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“before the sun skipped flakes of light across the ocean, then cast its whole bucketful against the sky.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“My mother and my mother’s mother were born in a place where time does not run as in Amber. I am the first of my mother’s line to bear all the marks of humanity.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I am Dara. Dara of Amber. Queen Dara. I hold this throne by right of blood and conquest.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I wait for the blackness, the emptiness, to be drawn, appropriate curtain for the theatrics with which I am burdened this night.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Fiona and Brand had reached beyond everything and found something, where none of the rest of us had believed anything to exist. The danger released was, on some level, almost worth the evidence obtained: we were not alone, nor were shadows truly our toys.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I am not unmindful of your thought processes as you speak. I feel the pain in your side, twin to my own. Yes, I know these things and more.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I nodded, appreciative of the way his mind worked, and resigned to letting him tell it his way.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Sequence and order, time and stress-they are most important in this matter. Allow me to savor the drama of the event in safe retrospect. I see me punctured and all of you gathered round. Ah! what I would not give to witness the tableau! Could you possibly describe for me the expression in each face?”

“I’m afraid their faces were my least concern at the time.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I’ll bare the basics, bridle the beast Unreason, and wrest from murky mystery the pearl of sweetest sense.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I bowed and blew her a kiss as I stepped forward into Amber, leaving her to clutch at rainbows as I caught hold of Random’s shoulder and staggered.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“You know how subtle Brand can be, finding out things without seeming to be after them.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“As you say, he had a way of drawing admissions from people.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“We spend so much time lying to one another that I decided it would be amusing to say what I really felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Simple curiosity, more than suspicion even, required that I search these faces for reactions, clues, indications-the faces that I knew better than any others, to the limits of my understanding such things. And of course they told me nothing.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I just noticed I am morbid and drunk and bitter. I don’t need that.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Don’t know why I should have to lie beside anyone I wouldn’t want next to me now, and there aren’t many.”

“You’re getting morbid, Corwin. Or drunk. Or both. Bitter, too. You don’t need that.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I could not tell whether it was a double or you playing games. The third possibility did cross my mind, though-that you had duelled in some adjacent area of Shadow for a sufficient time to cast shadows of yourself.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I had been wandering, looking for something novel, something that suited my fancy. I came upon that place at that time in the same way we find anything. I let my desires lead me and I followed my instincts.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“She had very lovely hair. Blue eyes, too, and tons of vanity to keep everything in her favorite perspective. At times she seemed to behave quite stupidly, but then at other times I have wondered.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“It was a splendid and cryptic old family heirloom which belonged right where it was, in the cellar.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“The price of being an Amberite, I suppose, is that you cannot even trust yourself.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“The mind is a funny place. I do not even trust my own.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“I would have taken genuine delight in looking helpless while actually pulling the strings that made all the others dance. Any of us would, though. We all have our motives, our ambitions.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“By looking at his face, I could no more tell whether he was lying, in whole or in part, than I could learn by scrutinizing the Jack of, say, Diamonds.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn