I don't know if I'm really the fastest. It doesn't matter.
You know how chickens are, imagining the world coming to an end one moment, then pecking corn the next.
He will not succeed in this," Taran said. "Somehow, we must find a way to escape. We dare not lose hope. " "I agree absolutely," Fflewddur answered. "Your general idea is excellent; it's only the details that are lacking.
I saw myself. . . in the time I watched, I saw strength and frailty, pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly much. Of intentions many good ones; but many more left undone. On this alas, I saw myself a man like any other. But this too I saw. . . Alike as men may seem, each is different as flakes of snow, no two the same. You told me you had no need to seek the Mirror, knowing you were Annlaw Clay-Shaper. Now I know who I am: myself and none other. I am Taran.
She has given you something of value: the truth in her heart.
If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?
Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.
What does not kill you will make you stronger and more cynical.
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.
I think that when people experience something that seems to be supernatural, in some ways it cuts through the secular mindset.
At last, after almost fifty years in the hopper, the most famous unpublished novel in America is in print. Who Shot the Water Buffalo? is a splendid story of comradeship in a time and place of constant peril, but it's Babbs's irrepressible exuberance and vast, affectionate good humor that make the story go. I love this novel.