“Your amoral ingenuity in the pursuit of your interest is perfectly shocking,” said Zacharias severely. “Yes, isn’t it?” said Prunella, pleased.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“But that was the trouble with children, Sir Stephen reflected. They were confoundedly liable to pattern themselves upon one’s conduct, when one would rather they simply did what they were told.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Why, all the greatest magic comes down to blood," said Mak Genggang. "And who knows blood better than a woman?”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Prunella had once thought life in London would be all flirting and balls and dresses, hitting attentive suitors on the shoulder with a fan, and breakfasting late upon bowls of chocolate. She sighed now for her naïveté. Little had she known life in London was in fact all hexes and murder and thaumaturgical politics, and she would always be rising early for some reason or other!”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Zacharias’s study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Are you going? What shall you wear?"
"I shall go in what I am standing in," said Mak Genggang. "A witch is always appropriate whatever her attire.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“A female may be poor or delicate or a spinster, but it does seem ill-advised of Miss Liddiard to combine all three.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“I should advise you not to stop there, but set fire to his house, too, and sell his children to pirates. That is the only way he will learn”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“He was a typical specimen of the younger son in avid pursuit of mediocrity with which the Theurgist’s teemed:”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“[A] life passed amid the feuds and rivalries of a girls' school had left Prunella not wholly unprepared for battle.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Her bulk seemed to fill the world, blocking out the horizon and casting a shadow over the magicians huddled on the wall. The enchantment appeared to encompass everything upon her person, for as she grew, so did the fronds of seaweed draped over her, and the pretty amber pendant on her breast expanded till it was itself the height and breadth of a grown man.
"Midsommer!" roared Lord Burrow. "Look to your wife!"
"He can hardly miss her", remarked Prunella.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Since the decision to become a parent is invariably self-interested, it is my belief that a parent's obligation is to the child, and the child's obligation is to itself.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society’s prohibition on women’s magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips!”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“It is a mother's duty to teach her daughters about the uses of blood, particularly a magical daughter.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“The woman leant forward, her eyes flashing, a smile both triumphant and tender curving her mouth.
"You are *my* daughter," she said. "Can there be any doubt that you will be brilliant -- audacious -- and free?"
The vision disappeared. She had been so vital, so overflowing with life and energy, that her going seemed to leave the room dark.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“What are acquaintance for, if not to supply the pleasures of gossip?”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“... it is strange to know you would be cast off by the people who greet you so warmly, if they knew the whole truth about you.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“I might go anywhere and do any magic I pleased if I were Peter, not Prunella.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“The statement brought up the old anger and confusion, followed by the accustomed guilt, that he should be so ungrateful as to resent the man who had rescued him from bondage. And yet he did resent Sir Stephen, even now.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“The caterpillars were a problem, however. Fat, fuzzy and complacent, they sat upon his vegetables in veritable hordes, ignoring him until he addressed one directly.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
The caterpillar paused the busy movement of its jaws to reply:
“Pleasant weather, this, eh?”
It was an ideal summer’s day. The skies stretched out in endless blue overhead, unmarred by a single wisp of cloud; the fresh scent of greenery and earth rose into the nostrils, imparting a lively pleasure in being alive and outdoors.
“You seem troubled, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said the caterpillar.
Zacharias experienced a brief internal struggle, but decided upon candour.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“One might have thought you had never met my aunt Georgiana,” said Rollo, with the steeliness of despair. “She is the one with the false curls and glowing eyes and smoke rising from her jaws. Do not you recollect her?”
“She did strike me as possessing unusual force of character,” admitted Damerell.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
“As Zacharias approached his conveyance, the scope of the undertaking to which he had agreed began to dawn upon him.
The chaise that was to bear him and Prunella to Fobdown Purlieu was indeed waiting. It was doubtful whether it was capable of doing anything else.
Turrill was a good-humoured man on the whole, whose anxieties about driving the Sorcerer Royal had been eased by Mr. Wythe’s being as pleasant-spoken and openhanded a gentleman as he had ever met (“Even if he is black as coal, I am sure that is none of his fault, and it would be a dull world if God had cut us all from the same pattern”). It was no wonder he felt hardly used upon this occasion, however, and Zacharias was not surprised to be addressed in terms of reproach.
“You hadn’t ought to have done it, sir,” said the coachman. “You may turn me into a frog for it, but I must speak my mind, and I say you hadn’t ought to have done it. If I had not given satisfaction, you had only to say the word and I should have hopped to it, not wishing to offend any gentleman of such a liberal disposition as yourself, and not being such a fool as to desire to vex a sorcerer besides. There was no call to go a-magicking the chaise—and where you got the squashes for it out of season, I am sure I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” said Zacharias, bending down to examine what had previously been a wheel, and was now an enormous squash.”
― Zen Cho, quote from Sorcerer to the Crown
Zen Cho
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“Replaying her words in my head, I could feel my face redden again.
I wanted to flush my head down the toilet.”
― Mark Peter Hughes, quote from Lemonade Mouth
“De esa apariencia se eleva ahora, cual un perfume de ambrosía, un nuevo mundo aparencial, casi visionario, del cual nada ven los que se hallan presos en la primera apariencia - un luminoso flotar en una delicia purísima y en una intuición sin dolor que irradia desde unos ojos muy abiertos.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy
“My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? . . .”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Genealogy of Morals
“This can’t be real. It will never be real, I won’t accept it. This isn’t happening. In her mind she saw his eyes open again, remembering her relief at seeing him alive. But he wasn’t… As soon as his hand had touched her, as it had so often before, she had known. The cold”
― Michael G. Manning, quote from The God-Stone War
“some battles aren’t fought with fists, some are fought by just standing up and facing it, facing the truth, learning that what others have done to you doesn’t have to make you who are you. Only you can do that—you have the power to say “enough” and walk away, truly walk away.”
― Marie Hall, quote from A Moment
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