Swords and Deviltry Quotes

“None can use black magic without straining the soul to the uttermost—and staining it into the bargain. None can inflict suffering without enduring the same. None can send death by spells and sorcery without walking on the brink of death’s own abyss, aye, and dripping his own blood into it. The forces black magic evokes are like two-edged poisoned swords with grips studded with scorpion stings. Only a strong man, leather-handed, in whom hate and evil are very powerful, can wield them, and he only for a space.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Fafhrd stopped, again wiped right hand on robe, and held it out. "Name's Fafhrd. Ef ay ef aitch ar dee."

Again the Mouser shook it. "Gray Mouser," he said a touch defiantly, as if challenging anyone to laugh at the sobriquet. "Excuse me, but how exactly do you pronounce that? Faf-hrud?"

"Just Faf-erd.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Fafhrd said, “You were a drunken idiot-genius indeed tonight, even if I was a drunken clodhopper. Lashing up my leg! Tying up our swords so we couldn’t use ’em save as clubs!” The Mouser shrugged. “Yet that sword-tying doubtless saved us from committing a number of murders tonight.” Fafhrd retorted, a little hotly, “Killing in fight isn’t murder.” Again the Mouser shrugged. “Killing is murder, no matter what nice names you give. Just as eating is devouring, and drinking guzzling. Gods, I’m dry, famished, and fatigued! Come on, soft cushions, food, and steaming gahveh!”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“But at the same time, I swore an oath by the morning star to avenge the deaths of Vilis and Hinerio. And some day I shall! With proper plans and help and a new cover. More than one high potentate of the Thieves’ Guild will learn how it feels to have his weasand narrowed a fingerclip’s breadth at a time, aye, and worse things!”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“The Mouser made a very small parry in carte so that the thrust of the bravo from the east went past his left side by only a hair's breath. He instantly riposted. His adversary, desperately springing back, parried in turn in carte. Hardly slowing, the tip of the Mouser's long, slim sword dropped under that parry with the delicacy of a princess curtsying and then leaped forward and a little upward, the Mouser making an impossibly long-looking lunge for one so small, and went between two scales of the bravo's armored jerkin and between his ribs and through his heart and out his back as if all were angelfood cake.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“From all around came very faintly a low sad hum, as the unhoused bees mourned.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Nature works by subtle, secret means—man's invisible seed, spider bite, the viewless spores of madness and of death, rocks that are born in earth's unknown bowels, the silent stars a-creep across the sky—and we thieves copy her.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“In their drunken preoccupation with the project at hand and mere locomotion, they did not look behind them. There the night-smog was thicker than ever. A high-circling nighthawk would have seen the stuff converging from all sections of Lankhmar, north, east, south, west—from the Inner Sea, from the Great Salt Marsh, from the many-ditched grain lands, from the River Hlal—in swift-moving black rivers and rivulets, heaping, eddying, swirling, dark and reeking essence of Lankhmar from its branding irons, braziers, bonfires, bonefires, kitchen fires and warmth fires, kilns, forges, breweries, distilleries, junk and garbage fires innumerable, sweating alchemists’ and sorcerers’ dens, crematoriums, charcoal burners’ turfed mounds, all those and many more…converging purposefully on Dim Lane and particularly on the Silver Eel and perhaps especially on the ricketty house behind it, untenanted except for attic. The closer to that center it got, the more substantial the smog became, eddy-strands and swirl-tatters tearing off and clinging to rough stone corners and scraggly-surfaced brick like black cobwebs.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Oh, no,” Fafhrd told her as he buckled on his sword. “You wanted the head of Krovas heaved at your feet in a great splatter of blood, and that’s what you’re going to get, like it or not!”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“You mean they’re both afraid to challenge the Thieves’ Guild, don’t you?” Ivrian said, eyes wide and face twisted by loathing. “I always thought my Mouse was a nobleman first and a thief second. Thieving’s nothing. My father lived by cruel thievery done on rich wayfarers and neighbors less powerful than he, yet he was an aristocrat. Oh, you’re cowards, both of you! Poltroons!” she finished, turning her eyes flashing with cold scorn first on the Mouser, then on Fafhrd. The latter could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet, face flushed, fists clenched at his sides, quite unmindful of his down-clattered mug and the ominous creak his sudden action drew from the sagging floor. “I am not a coward!” he cried. “I’ll dare Thieves’ House and fetch you Krovas’ head and toss it with blood a-drip at Vlana’s feet. I swear that, witness me, Kos the god of dooms, by the brown bones of Nalgron my father and by his sword Graywand here at my side!”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“You’re the Rug Robber!” he proclaimed. “You’re the Carpet Crimp!—and the Candle Corsair too,” he continued, referring to two series of unsolved thefts which had been on the lips of all Lankhmar when he and Vlana had arrived a moon ago. The Mouser shrugged impassive-faced at Fafhrd, then suddenly grinned, his slitted eyes a-twinkle, and broke into an impromptu dance which carried him whirling and jigging around the room and left him behind Fafhrd, where he deftly reached down the hooded and long-sleeved huge robe from the latter’s stooping shoulders, shook it out, carefully folded it, and set it on a pillow.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Fafhrd said, “Our motives for being here seem identical.” “Seem? Surely must be!” the Mouser answered curtly, fiercely eyeing this potential new foe, who was taller by a head than the tall thief. “You said?” “I said, ‘Seem? Surely must be!’ ” “How civilized of you!” Fafhrd commented in pleased tones. “Civilized?” the Mouser demanded suspiciously, gripping his dirk tighter. “To care, in the eye of action, exactly what’s said,” Fafhrd explained. Without letting the Mouser out of his vision, he glanced down. His gaze traveled from the belt and pouch of one fallen thief to those of the other. Then he looked up at the Mouser with a broad, ingenuous smile. “Sixty-sixty?” he suggested. The Mouser hesitated, sheathed his dirk, and rapped out, “A deal!” He knelt abruptly, his fingers on the drawstrings of Fissif’s pouch. “Loot you Slivikin,” he directed.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Silent as specters, the tall and the fat thief edged past the dead, noose-strangled watch-leopard, out the thick, lock-picked door of Jengao the Gem Merchant, and strolled east on Cash Street through the thin black night-smog of Lankhmar, City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“No, I ran afoul of a law older even than Lankhmar’s and a court less merciful. In short, my friend’s and my own cover was finally blown by the Thieves’ Guild, a most ancient organization with locals in every city of the civilized world with a hidebound law against female membership and with a deep detestation of all freelance pilferers.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Lankhmar City would feed me, aye, feed me well—and be paid only with lumps and perhaps a deep scratch or two. So to Lankhmar I went. Falling in there with a clever girl of the same turn of mind and some experience, I did well for two full rounds of moons and a few more. We worked only in black garb, and called ourselves to ourselves the Dark Duo.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“The Snow Women do not love you. Nor is Mor my mother your friend.” “Do they think to frighten me with ice crystals?” Vlana demanded contemptuously. “Why, I know of Eastern fire sorceries compared to which their feeble magickings—” “But you are in their territory now, at the mercy of their element, which is crueler and subtler than fire,” Fafhrd interposed, brushing away the last of the bulgings, so that the hoops stood up again and the leather stretched almost flat between them. “Do not underrate their powers.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Actors make great sacrifices, which the yokels and even their co-mates rarely appreciate.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Gods, what an easy life the Guild-beggars have," the other niche-guard observed to his mate. "What slack discipline and low standards of skill! Perfect, my sacred butt! You'd think a child could see through those disguises."
"Doubtless some children do," his mate retorted. "But their dear mothers and fathers only drop a tear and a coin or give a kick. Grown folk go blind, lost in their toil and dreams, unless they have a profession such as thieving which keeps them mindful of things as they really are.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“There are laws of hate in the universe, shaping even its loves, and it is time I made them work for me.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“As for civilization, it stinks.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“At Cold Corner in midwinter, the women of the Snow Clan were waging a cold war against the men. They trudged about like ghosts in their whitest furs, almost invisible against the new-fallen snow, always together in female groups, silent or at most hissing like angry shades. They avoided Godshall with its trees for pillars and walls of laced leather and towering pine-needle roof.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“Women are horrible. I mean, quite as horrible as men. Oh, is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry