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Ice Quotes

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Ice Quotes

“We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?”

“With all the global warming going around nowadays, it would only take the stubbornness of a mule and the patience of a sitting duck to achieve what no man has ever done before – namely melt the ice in a wax figure’s beaten heart that was chopped off and hidden 50 meters under the polar ice caps in Alaska, to protect it from feeling.”

“Now, there are a few dryadologists who could resist the opportunity to sample faerie food, the enchanted sort served at the tables of the courtly fae---I know several who have dedicated their careers to the subject and would hand over their eye teeth for the opportunity. I stopped at a stand offering toasted cheese---a very strange sort of cheese, threaded with glittering mold. It smelled divine, and the faerie merchant rolled it in crushed nuts before handing it over on a stick, but as soon as it touched my palm, it began to melt. The merchant was watching me, so I put it in my mouth, pantomiming my delight. The cheese tasted like snow and melted within seconds. I stopped next at a stand equipped with a smoking hut. The faerie handed me a delicate fillet of fish, almost perfectly clear despite the smoking. I offered it to Shadow, but he only looked at me with incomprehension in his eyes. And, indeed, when I popped it into my mouth, it too melted flavorlessly against my tongue. I took a wandering course to the lakeshore, conscious of the need to avoid suspicion. I paused at the wine merchant, who had the largest stand. It was brighter than the others, snow piled up behind it in a wall that caught the lantern light and threw it back in a blinding glitter. I had to look down at my feet, blinking back tears, as one of the Folk pressed an ice-glass into my hand. Like the food, the wine smelled lovely, of sugared apples and cloves, but it slid eerily within the ice, more like oil than wine. Shadow kept growling at it, as he had not with the faerie food, and so I tipped it onto the snow. Beside the wine merchant was a stand offering trinkets, frozen wildflowers that many of the Folk threaded through their hair or wove through unused buttonholes on their cloaks, as well as an array of jewels with pins in them. I could not compare them to any jewels I knew; they were mostly in shades of white and winter grey, hundreds of them, each impossibly different from the next. I selected one that I knew, without understanding how, was the precise color of the icicles that hung from the stone ledges of the Cambridge libraries in winter. But moments after I pinned it to my breast, all that remained was a patch of damp.”

“En réponse à cette sorcellerie, les lames runiques de Skynth s’illuminèrent et se couvrirent d’une fine pellicule glacée alors qu’une litanie enflait dans les rangs des défenseurs : Si les Dieux d’Yskaz le veulent… L’on siégera à leur droite Sous les étoiles cristallines et moirées Dans les glaces scintillantes Si les Dieux d’Yskaz le veulent… L’on passera à leur gauche Sur les brisants nuées pâles et mouvantes Dans les Landes Figées Si les Dieux d’Yskaz le veulent… Le peuple d’Yskaz affectionnait les runes de froid au combat et l’on disait volontiers dans les cinq royaumes que le baiser d’une lame en acier d’Yskaz était plus froid que la mort elle-même.”

“I drag the body out into the snowdrifts, as far away from our shack as I can muster. I put her in a thicket of trees, where the green seems to still have a voice in the branches, and try not to think about the beasts that’ll soon be gathering. There’s no way of burying her; the ground is a solid rock of ice beneath us. I kneel beside her and want desperately to weep. My throat tightens and my head aches. Everything hurts inside. But I have no way of releasing it. I’m locked up and hard as stone. “I’m sorry, Mamma,” I whisper to the shell in front of me. I take her hand. It could belong to a glass doll. There’s no life there anymore. So I gather rocks, one by one, and set them over her, trying my best to protect her from the birds, the beasts, keep her safe as much as I can now. I pile the dark stones gently on her stomach, her arms, and over her face, until she becomes one with the mountain. I stand and study my work, feeling like the rocks are on me instead, then I leave the body for the forest and ice.”

“Emotions, whims and lies, fascinations and games. Feelings and their absence. Gifts, which may not be accepted. Lies and truth. What is truth? The negation of lies? Or the statement of a fact? And if the fact is a lie, what then is the truth? Who is full of feelings which torment him, and who is the empty carapace of a cold skull? Who? What is truth, Geralt? What is the essence of truth?’ ‘I don’t know, Yen. Tell me.’ ‘No,’ she said and lowered her eyes. For the first time. He had never seen her do that before. Never. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I cannot, Geralt. I cannot tell you that. That bird, begotten from the touch of your hand, will tell you. Bird? What is the essence of truth?’ ‘Truth,’ the kestrel said, ‘is a shard of ice.”

“The snow grew deeper as we laboured down the hill. The land was a flat white pall, spread out like rumpled wool. Into the distance stretched the solid sea, sullen and murky beneath the ice. The sea will trick a man, seeming frozen and steadfast on the surface, but under the white crust, the black water gulps greedily at the breathing world above. In time, I knew, despite everything that had happened, the sun would rise and the light would glitter off the ice, like shards of glass. The world would glow.”

“But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.2 So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes. Then hand him or her a snow cone or organize a catch-a-snowflake-on-your-tongue party. Once the ice-forming process is started, more molecules join the party, and the crystal grows. It can ultimately become either a snowflake or a rough granule of ice called by the odd name graupel. A snowflake contains ten quintillion water molecules. That’s ten million trillion. Ten snowflakes—which can fit on your thumb tip—have the same number of molecules as there are grains of sand on the earth. Or stars in the visible universe. How many flakes, how many molecules fashioned the snowy landscape I was observing as I drove east? It numbed the brain.”

“But there it was- crackling inside my veins. Crackling beside veins of ice, and water. And darkness. Embers flared around us, floating in the air, and I sent out a breath of soothing dark, a breath of ice and water, as if it were a wind- a wind at dawn, sweeping clean the world. The power did not belong to the High Lords. Not any longer. It belonged to me- as I belonged only to me, as my future was mine to decide, to forge. Once I discovered and mastered what the others had given me, I could weave them together- into something new, something of every court and none of them.”

“Towering, exquisite palaces, full of roaring hearths and bedecked in evergreens. Carved sleighs were the court's preferred method of transportation, hauled by velvet-antlered reindeer whose splayed hooves were ideal for the ice and snow. Their forces were well trained, but they often relied on the great, white bears that stalked the realm for any unwanted visitors.”

“The lake hadn’t been frozen long and of all them had been expressly forbidden to go out on it, but Norman Pye, who was older than the rest of them, said that it would be safe if they slid out on their bellies. So they did. “We thought it was exciting as all get out,” Miss Vernon said. “We could hear the ice cracking but it didn’t give, and we slid across it like seals. Oh, it was tremendous fun. The ice was clear as glass and you could see right to the bottom. All the stones lying there, brighter and more colourful than they ever are when you look through the water. You could even see fish swimming about. And then all at once there was this loud crack and the whole sheet gave way, and there we were in the water.”

“Others, I am not the first, Have willed more mischief than they durst: If in the breathless night I too Shiver now, 'tis nothing new. More than I, if truth were told, Have stood and sweated hot and cold, And through their veins in ice and fire Fear contended with desire. Agued once like me were they, But I like them shall win my way Lastly to the bed of mould Where there's neither heat nor cold. But from my grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night.”