I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.
Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty? he wonders. Or is all beauty created through pain? Is that the secret of great art, both human and Melnibonen?
Ah, the world was ever so. How sad are heroes when their tasks are done…
Man may trust man, Prince Elric, but perhaps we’ll never have a truly sane world until men learn to trust mankind. That would mean the death of magic, I think.
You Mabden seem to think that happiness must be bought with misery… It is not easy for Vadhagh to understand that. We believe — believed — that happiness was a natural condition of reasoning beings.
Corum knew that he was mad, in Vadhagh terms. But he supposed that he was sane enough in Mabden terms. And this was, after all, now a Mabden world. He must learn to accept its peculiar disorders as normal, if he were going to survive.
There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.
Trapped. Sinking. Can’t be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone’s fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?
Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.
We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.