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There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

You simplify the multiverse. Neither Law nor Chaos are forces for good or evil in themselves. It is the use to which they are put by mortals that determines those qualities…

[T]he lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder.

Out there nothing exists as yet. If you venture into it, you will be confronted again by creatures of your hidden fancy, for there is nothing else to behold. […] Once in a while […] there comes a man […] who can withstand such an ordeal. Then may the frontiers of the world be extended, for when a man stands against Chaos it must recede and new lands spring into being!

Next day I understood more clearly. I could never be at peace again till I had written my charge against the gods. It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.

‘Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.’

Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it.

No self-respecting High Priest is going to go through all the business with the trumpets and the processions and the banners and everything, and then shove his knife into a daffodil and a couple of plums. You’ve got to face it, all this stuff about golden boughs and the cycles of nature and stuff just boils down to sex and violence, usually at the same time.

I have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

Many of the books were magical, and the important thing to remember about grimoires is that they are deadly in the hands of any librarian who cares about order, because he’s bound to stick them all on the same shelf. This is not a good idea with books that tend to leak magic, because more than one or two of them together form a critical Black Mass.

Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals, which were sown this year to come up later this year, biennials, sown this year to grow next year, and perennials, sown this year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could be planted this year to come up last year.

These be nott manifest, but They do wait in patience for a tyme that ys nott yet. Of a hydeous potency be ye blackness wherein They dwell, for They do nott always sleep. […] Beneath that far Northe, in ye ancient tymes yclept Hyperborea, do They wait. Afar in ye East, beneath vaste plateaus, They be rumoured. In ye new darke lands across ye seas They surely be.
— Monstres and Their Kynde

Rescuing beleaguered maidens had a certain passing reward, but most of the time he'd finished up by setting them up in some city somewhere with a handsome dowry, because after a while even the most agreeable ex-maiden became possessive and had scant sympathy for his efforts to rescue her sister sufferers.

No people less romantic than the Phœnicians ever lived, but for the moment all the world seemed bathed in a rosy glow, life with its hard realities melted into a swimming dream, perfumed, iridescent, with clouds under winged feet and bodies light as air.

Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting "All gods are bastards".

He spent his leisure time in writing—studies of obscure periods in forgotten history that, when published, merely added to the clutter of the world’s huge mental lumber-room, to judge by the reviews.

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

[T]he old and ancient writers did affirm, that Fortune was stark blind without eyes, because she always bestoweth her riches upon evil persons, and fools, and chooseth or favoureth no mortal person by judgment […] she showeth such evil or contrary opinions in men, that the wicked do glory with the name of good, and contrary the good and innocent be detracted and slandered as evil.

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

DIALLO: You’ve been acting since you were very young, isn’t that right?
RAYMONDE: Very young. I was in a commercial when I was three. Do you remember commercials?
DIALLO: I do, regrettably.

I will declare how one by hap
his human figure lost,
And how in brutish formed shape
his loathed life he tossed.
And how he was in course of time
from such a state unfold,
Who eftsoons turn’d to pristine shape,
his lot unlucky told.

In Traverse City Kirsten had stared at the This webpage is not available message on the screen. She didn’t seriously believe that the inventor would be able to find the Internet, but she was fascinated by electricity.

“What is the point of anything?” unhelpfully returned the witch. “Flesh is dust, life unreal, an illusion, a play we are at.”

For the mind of Man alone is free to explore the lofty vastness of the cosmic infinite, to transcend ordinary consciousness, or roam the subterranean corridors of the human brain with its boundless dimensions. And universe and individual are linked, the one mirrored in the other, and each contains the other.
-- The Chronicle of the Black Sword.

She yearned to die, but had not the courage to accomplish it. She yearned to live, and knew this was to be denied her.

The pomp of the proceedings otherwise discomforted Pereban. He had been used to modest and apologetic festivals of death, whereat the gods’ forgiveness was asked for the temerity of having lived at all.

Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier believes in nothing. Or rather, if he believes in anything, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This cannot be denied by any rational man.

And he sang how in the beginning the earth and the heaven and the sea
In the selfsame form were blended together in unity,
And how baleful contention each from other asunder tore;
And he sang of the goal of the course in the firmament fixed evermore
For the stars and the moon, and the printless paths of the journeying sun,
And how the mountains arose, how rivers that babbling run […]

“Say nothing then. You do not need to speak of it to make it so. It has occurred.”
“But I shall think it a dream.”
“All life is thus.”

Dr. Peddie had once explained to Goodsir that the vast majority of the medicines were useless for the specific sailor’s ailments — most merely served to clean out the bowels and belly in an explosive manner — but the more powerful the purgative, the more effective the seamen thought the treatment was. It was the idea of medicinal help that helped the sailors heal, according to the late Peddie.