The Wild Quotes

“Who would bring light must endure burning.”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“If you kill me, you kill yourself."
[...]
He only wanted to convey to Janegg the truth of ahimsa, which is that all beings were connected to each other in the deepest way and thus it was impossible to harm another without harming oneself.”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“Danlo looked down to see himself holding the knife. To see is to be free, he thought. To see that I see. As he looked deeply into himself, he was overcome with a strange sense that he had perfect will over shatterwood and steel, over hate, over pain, over himself. He remembered then why he had taken his vow of ahimsa. In the most fundamental way, his life and the lamb's were one and the same. He was aware of this unity of their spirits – this awareness was both an affliction and a grace. The lamb was watching him, he saw, bleating and shivering as he locked eyes with Danlo. Killing the lamb would be killing himself, and he was very aware that such a self-murder was the one sin that life must never commit. To kill the lamb would be to remove a marvelous thing from life, and more, to inflict great pain and terror. And this he could not do, even though the face and form of his beloved Tamara burned so dearly inside him that he wanted to cry out at the cruelty of the world. He looked at the lamb, and the animal's wild eye burned like a black coal against the whiteness of his wool. In remembrance of the fierce will to life with which he and all things had been born – and in relief at freeing himself from the Entity's terrible temptation – he began to laugh, softly, grimly, wildly.”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“In every man and woman there are three phases of life more descriptive of the soul’s inner journey than are childhood, maturity and old age: It can’t happen to me; I can overcome it; I accept it.”
― David Zindell, The Wild