Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Bi oju ri enu a pamo. Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.

He is my friend.” “Nobody ever gets betrayed by their enemy.

When kings fall they fall on top of us.

Everything in the world cooks down to two. Either- or, if-then, yes-no, night-day, good-bad. You all believe in twos so much I wonder if any of you can count to three.

If you lived all your life with monsters, what was monstrous?

We don't own truth. Truth is truth and nothing you can do about it even if you hide it, or kill it, or even tell it. It was truth before you open your mouth and say, That there is a true thing. Truth is truth even after them who rule send poison griots to spread lie till they take root in every man's heart.

You think as they do that suffering from cruelty or escaping it is a matter of choice or means, when it is matter of power.

Life is love and I have no love left. Love has drained itself from me, and run to a river like this one.

You ever see a man who doesn’t know he’s unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman’s face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.

Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.

Everywhere I go to find this boy, to save this boy, I run into something worse than what we are saving him from … but we still think monsters are the ones with claws, and scales and skin.

The moon moved in so close she eavesdropped on us.

And Smoke Girl. He who was mine said, One of them must have a name from where I come from. One must remind me of me. So he named Smoke Grl Khamseen, for the wind that blows fifty days.

You’ll be asking of love next,” he said. “Well, do you have love for the man, and does the man love you?” He looked straight at me. Either he just grew whiskers, or I just saw them. “Nobody loves no one,” he said. He turned away and nodded at the tree.

Better to be with the ancestors than to live bonded to somebody else, who might be kind, who might be cruel, who might even make you master to many slaves of your own, but was still master over you.

I am content with much. This world never gives me anything, and yet I have everything I want.

You Kongori do not believe in magic and spirits.” “I am not Kongori, but you speak true, I do not believe. Some people believe the goddess speaks to leaves so they grow, and whisper in a spell to coax a flower to open wide. Others believe that if they just feed it sun and water, both will make them grow. There are only two things, Tracker: that which men of wisdom can explain, and that which they will explain. Of course you do not agree.” “Just like all you men of learning. Everything in the world cooks down to two. Either-or, if-then, yes-no, night-day, good-bad. You all believe in twos so much I wonder if any of you can count to three.” “Harsh. But you are no believer either.” “Maybe I have no love for sides.” “Maybe you have no love for commitment.

Seems what all lands do share are gods so petty and jealous that they would rather destroy all the worlds than have one that moves on without them.

What a day when a man tell me what to do.

Nyka was like a man coming back from things I was yet to go through.

Being a fool is a curse too

For you to say that sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.

Day seven, I saw that I was still a boy. There were men stronger, and women too. There were men wiser, and women too. There were men quicker, and women too. There was always someone or some two or some three who will grab me like a stick and break me, grab me like wet cloth, and wring everything out of me. And that was just the way of the world. That was the way of everybody’s world. I who thought he had his hatchets and his cunning, will one day be grabbed and tossed and thrown in with shit, and beaten and destroyed. I am the one who will need saving, and it’s not that someone will come and save me, or that nobody will, but that I will need saving, and walking forth in the world in the shape and step of a man meant nothing.

You could have a family of one and still drive them apart.

TRACKER: It was the year your most excellent King shat his most excellent life out in the most excellent shit pit. INQUEST: Speaking ill of the King is punishable by death in the South Kingdom. TRACKER: He’s a corpse, not a king.

sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.

I don’t believe in belief.

Soldiers are fools not paid enough to be fools.