The Chronicles of Amber

"You have to explore every contingency if you want to keep winning the survival game."

"I brought my emotions to heel. One by one, you must deal with those things that come to hand, I told myself. That is all. Divorce the feelings from the speculations, or at least provide for separate maintenance."

"To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those other guys," I said, "I wish I had known this some time ago."

"We drank a silent toast to futility."

"For a moment I regarded the Pattern—a shining mass of curved lines that tricked the eye as it tried to trace them—imbedded there, huge, in the floor's slick blackness. It had given me power over Shadow, it had restored most of my memory. It would also destroy me in an instant if I were to essay it improperly. What gratitude the prospect did arouse in me was therefore not untinged with fear. It was a splendid and cryptic old family heirloom which belonged right where it was, in the cellar."

"Most things depend on other things. This thing is no different."

"If you herald some turn in our fortunes, if you bring us some measure of grace—thanks, unicorn," I said. "And even if you do not, thanks for the brightness of your company at a dark time.""

"Life's incessant ceremonies leap everlasting, humans spring eternal on hope's breast, and frying pans without fires are often far between."

"The others glanced our way as she appeared and she hit them all with that smile, like the Mona Lisa with a machine gun, turning slowly."

"“Your words are ill-considered,” I said. “Not so. I considered every one of them,” he answered. “We spend so much time lying to one another that I decided it might be amusing to say what I really felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed.”"

"I, of course, am innocent of all but malice."

"Former friends make the worst enemies."

"Out of every life a little blood must spill."

"But I wonder... I've a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out."

"If blood be the price of admiralty, I’ve just bought me a naval commission."

"How to put simply that which is not a simple thing...? Solipsism, I suppose, is where we have to begin—the notion that nothing exists but the self, or, at least, that we cannot truly be aware of anything but our own existence and experience. I can find, somewhere, off in Shadow, anything I can visualize. Any of us can. This, in good faith, does not transcend the limits of the ego. It may be argued, and in fact has, by most of us, that we create the shadows we visit out of the stuff of our own psyches, that we alone truly exist, that the shadows we traverse are but projections of our own desires.... Whatever the merits of this argument, and there are several, it does go far toward explaining much of the family's attitude toward people, places, and things outside of Amber. Namely, we are toymakers and they, our playthings—sometimes dangerously animated, to be sure; but this, too, is part of the game. We are impresarios by temperament, and we treat one another accordingly. While solipsism does tend to leave one slightly embarrassed on questions of etiology, one can easily avoid the embarrassment by refusing to admit the validity of the questions. Most of us are, as I have often observed, almost entirely pragmatic in the conduct of our affairs. Almost... Yet—yet there is a disturbing element in the picture. There is a place where the shadows go mad.... When you purposely push yourself through layer after layer of Shadow, surrendering—again, purposely—a piece of your understanding every step of the way, you come at last to a mad place beyond which you cannot go. Why do this? In hope of an insight, I'd say, or a new game ... But when you come to this place, as we all have, you realize that you have reached the limit of Shadow or the end of yourself—synonymous terms, as we had always thought. Now, though... Now I know that it is not so, now as I stand, waiting, without the Courts of Chaos, telling you what it was like, I know that it is not so."

"Why have we been brought here and shown this thing?" "It does not correspond to the true state of affairs," I said. "It is the true state of affairs." Ganelon turned toward us. "On that shadow Earth we visited—where you had spent so many years—I heard a poem about two roads that diverged in a wood," he said. "It ends, 'I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.' When I heard it, I thought of something you had once said—'All roads lead to Amber'—and I wondered then, as I do now, at the difference the choice may make, despite the end's apparent inevitability to those of your blood." "You know?" I said. "You understand?" "I think so." He nodded, then pointed. "That is the real Amber down there, isn't it?" "Yes," I said. "Yes, it is."

"It was your perceptiveness rather than the conclusion itself which stunned me so."

"About a week ago, brother Caine was murdered, under conditions arranged to show me as the culprit. The fact that I had slain his slayer was hardly satisfactory evidence of my innocence, in that the guy was necessarily in no condition to talk about it."

"[A] man should have the right to lead his own life without the meddling of relatives, no matter how well-intentioned."

"As I saw it, he owed me nothing now, nor I him—if one keeps a scoreboard tally on such matters. Therefore, it was friendship alone that bound us, a stronger thing than bygone debts and points of honor: in other words, a thing which gave him the right to bug me on matters such as this, where I might have told even Random to go to hell once I had made up my mind. I realized I should not be irritated when everything that he said was tendered in good faith."

"I closed my eyes, closed them to join her in darkness, to recall for a brief while the world where other messages than light waves took precedence."

"Another day and we’re still alive. Maybe even a trifle wiser. Wise enough to realize there are many more things we still need to know."

""Good evening, Lord Corwin," said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it. "Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?" "A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful." "You enjoy this duty?" He nodded. "I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here." "Fitting, fitting," I said."

""Anything you like. Have you any preferences? My flight from Chaos to this small sudden island in the sea of night? My meditations upon the abyss? The revelation of the Pattern in a jewel hung round the neck of a unicorn? My transcription of the design by lightning, blood, and lyre while our fathers raged baffled, too late come to call me back while the poem of fire ran that first route in my brain, infecting me with the will to form? Too late! Too late... Possessed of the abominations born of the disease, beyond their aid, their power, I planned and built, captive of my new self. Is that the tale you'd hear again? Or rather I tell you of its cure?" My mind spun at the implications he had just scattered by the fistful. I could not tell whether he spoke literally or metaphorically or was simply sharing paranoid delusions, but the things that I wanted to hear, had to hear, were things closer to the moment. So, regarding the shadowy image of myself from which that ancient voice emerged, "Tell me of its cure," I said."

"I could not be truly harmed because the Pattern protects me, and who but I could harm the Pattern? A beautiful closed system, it seemed, its weakness totally shielded by its strength. ... My blood, with which I drew it, could deface it. But it took me ages to realize that the blood of my blood could also do this thing."

"I pointed Grayswandir at his eyes. "Talk is cheap," I said. "Whiskey costs money.""

"When that many questions arise from a single event the answer is seldom obtainable by pure logic. I had to sort out the possibilities though, to have something to reach for when more facts did turn up."

"“You seem to have everything figured. You surprised me, moving so fast.” “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands recently, which can be a bad thing unless you use it for thinking. So I did.”"

"If I’d the mind, a few more steps would send me along that celestial escalator into the place of dreams made real, walking neuroses and dubious prophecy, into a moonlit city of ambiguous wish fulfillment, twisted time, and pallid beauty."

"To be honest, it had to be a form of madness, to have so much and to strive so bitterly for just a little more, for a bit of an edge over the others."

"Like most such questions, the benefit of these was in the asking, not the answering."

"It changed nothing to run a posthumous psychoanalysis. Acts and their consequences are the things by which our fellows judge us. Anything else, and all that you get is a cheap feeling of moral superiority by thinking how you would have done something nicer if it had been you."

"I looked back once to the empty place where my dream had come true. Such is the stuff."

"It was realized long ago that the two kingdoms can never be merged, or one destroyed, without also disrupting all the processes that lie in flux between us. Total stasis or complete chaos would be the result."

"Premonitions played tag in the grottoes of my mind, none of which I would have cared to take to lunch."

"I have run into this difficulty with Scripture in the past. It tells you enough to get interested, but never enough to be of any immediate use. It is as though the author gets his kicks by tantalizing."

"There is a time for subtlety and a time for brute force. I was both angry and in a hurry, so the decision was made."

"Sometimes it's damned hard to tell the dancer from the dance."

"Do we make the Shadow worlds? Or are they there, independent of us, awaiting our footfalls? Or is there an unfairly excluded middle? Is it a matter of more or less, rather than either-or? A dry chuckle arose suddenly as I realized that I might never know the answer for certain."

"“He is groping after something,” he went on, “but proceeding incorrectly by holding the world responsible for his own failings.”"

"“I can see that you have a lot to unlearn.” “If you are talking about my vulgar instinct for survival, forget it.”"

"The fact that you find consensus reality barren tells me more about you than it does about that state of affairs."

"“You are not so blind that you deny the Absolute, the beginning and end of everything?” “It is not indispensable to a liberal education.”"

"...And, as the Pattern in Rebma had helped to restore my faded memories, so this one I was now striving to create stirred and elicited the smell of the chestnut trees, of the wagonloads of vegetables moving through the dawn toward the Halles.... I was not in love with anyone in particular at the time, though there were many girls—Yvettes and Mimis and Simones, their faces merge—and it was spring in Paris, with Gipsy bands and cocktails at Louis'.... I remembered, and my heart leaped with a kind of Proustian joy while Time tolled about me like a bell.... And perhaps this was the reason for the recollection, for this joy seemed transmitted to my movements, informed my perceptions, empowered my will...."

"To have come this close, passing through everything that I had, and then to fail here.... It made me want to cry “Injustice!” though I knew the universe did not run in accordance with my notions of equity."

"My children, I cannot say that I am entirely pleased with you, but I suppose this works both ways."

"I felt that I had done my duty. Nothing drove me now. I had run out of causes and was as close as I might ever be to peace. With all this behind me, I felt that if I had to die now, it was all right. I would not protest quite so loudly as I would have at any other time."

"I wish that you had never been born and, failing that, that you had died sooner. Enough! It diminishes me to reflect so. Be dead and trouble my thinking no more."

"Good-bye and hello, as always."