The Book of the Dun Cow

Sorrow spoken lends a little courage to the speaker.

Her ballad did nothing to make the serpants lovely. Her ballad hid nothing of their dread. But the music itself spoke of faith and certainty; the melody announced the presence of God.

A grudge may be strong. But a grudge isn't strength!

He went wordless, and wordless he sat beside her. He knew the size of her sorrow.

Aye. He wills that I work his work in this place. Indeed. I am left behind to labor. Right 'And one day he may show his face beneath his damnable clouds to tell me what that work might be; what's worth so many tears; what's so important in his sight that is needs to be done this way... 'O my sons!'Chauntecleer suddenly wailed at the top of his lungs, a light flaring before it goes out: 'How much I want you with me!

But a good novel is first of all an event; as distinguished from the continuous rush of many sensations and the messy overlapping experiences of our daily lives, it is a composed experience in which all sensations are tightly related, for which there is a beginning and an ending, within which the reader’s perceivings and interpretations are shaped for a while by the internal integrity of all the elements of the narrative.

WELL, THEN SHAG IT, YOU SUITCASE! GET OVER HERE!

: “Behold the Rooster who suffers much more than he must. Ah, Chauntecleer, Chauntecleer. Why do you suffer today and tomorrow?” oozed the compassionate voice. “Curse God. Curse him, and all will be done. Or, lest you forget the truth of things, remember: I am Wyrm. And I am here.

How can the meek of the earth save themselves against the damnable evil which feeds on them?

Almost as evil as the stench was the silence. Senex, however poorly he had ended his rule, had always remembered the canonical crows. He sang them, to be sure, in a disoriented manner; but he did sing them, keeping his animals that way, banding them, unifying them. But Cockatrice never crowed the canon. So under him the day lost its meaning and its direction, and the animals lost any sense of time or purpose. Their land became strange to them. A terrible feeling of danger entered their souls, of things undone, of treasures unprotected. They were tired all the day long, and at night they did not sleep. And it was a most pitiful sight to see, how they all went about with hunched shoulders, heads tucked in, limping here and there as if they were forever walking into an ill wind, and flinching at every sound as if the wind carried arrows.

Her eyes were liquid with compassion—deep, deep, as the earth is deep. Her brow knew his suffering and knew, besides that, worlds more. But the goodness was that, though this wide brow knew so much, yet it bent over his pain alone and creased with it.