The War Hound and the World's Pain Quotes

“Yet now all the world seemed to be afire. Whole forests burst into flame; whole towns burnt as fiercely as ever Magdeburg had burnt.
“Ah,” said Philander Groot, “it could be the End, after all, my friends.”
“And good riddance to it,” I said. “It is a poor world, a bad world, a decadent world. It expects love without sacrifice. It expects immediate gratification of its desires, as a child might, as a beast might. And if it does not receive gratification it becomes pettish and destroys in a tantrum. What’s the use of seeking a Cure for its Pain, Philander Groot? What’s the use of attempting, by any means, to divert it from its well-earned doom?”
“Because we are alive, I suppose, Captain Von Bek. Because we have no choice but to hope to make it better, through our own designs.” Philander Groot seemed amused by me.
“The world is the world,” said Sedenko. “We cannot change it. That is for God to do.”
“Perhaps He thinks it is for us to do,” said Groot quietly.”
― Michael Moorcock, The War Hound and the World's Pain

“He looked up at me and his face was now innocent and pleading. "Am I truly damned, captain? Am I bound for Hell?"

I could not reply.

When he was dead I raised myself to my feet and I looked about me. Everything was still. A loneliness had come upon my soul.

There was darkness everywhere now but in the forest. And even here there were wisps of grey, as if evil crept in.

I lifted my head to the sky and shook my fist, "Oh, I reject you. I reject your Heaven and I reject your hell. Do as you wish with me, but know that your desires are petty and your ambitions have no meaning!"

I addressed no-one. I addressed the universe. I addressed a void.”
― Michael Moorcock, The War Hound and the World's Pain