Without water we are nothing, the traveler thought. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.
Why demons, when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, w...
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was a...
What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains...
The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.
So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, ar...
People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're goo...
Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpot… I had to go into exile to learn that the children of...
Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
Is it possible that evil is never total, that its victory, no matter how overwhelming, is never absolute?Consider this fallen man. He sought without remorse to shatter the mind of a fellow human being...
In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us fr...
I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, Ikick. Ro...
Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed.
But it's not as simple as that, he told himself, because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Act...
Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.
A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads – but you will only see one – there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praise...
We look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the ga...
You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old Ameri...
When you’ve fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained huma...