Graham Thomas Wilcox > Quotes

“Our teachers and troubadours stuffed our minds with the tales of our fathers - Aristotle and Arthur, Christ and Chretien. Our swordmasters swelled our thews with the steps and strikes of our fathers' fathers. Our thoughts tread again the paths first cut by our forebears' minds. Thus we hop and hew in the image of our fathers, and the fathers of our fathers. How might we then count ourselves new men, and not but shades of elder days, fleshed afresh in gaudy youth? Do we martyr ourselves upon knighthood's altar of our volition, or does some greater mind print its thumb upon us and so mold us into familar shape? What will lies within? What choice? Are we men, or the echoes of men, seeded once and springing forever from the same tired earth, watered forevermore by chivalry's iron unguent?”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy