15 Quotes by R.A. Lafferty

Olympius, in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the forces in Bologna to take the field against Alaric, on peril of the death of their families. The generals sent word that they could not find the forces of Alaric. The scouts from Bologna silently saluted the Goths of Alaric as they went by, but they could not find them.

Alaric now at this moment of supreme crisis, coming down to the rough shore and seeing the howling waves, raised his hand to heaven and called out that the Gulf of Corinth should freeze!It froze!And the Goths, shattering the last scrim of Roman interceptors, abandoned their horses and crossed the ice on foot!

The Western Empire, supported generation after generation by half a hundred of the strongest and most remarkable men in history, from Stilicho to Charlemagne, died and disintegrated and left off being the Empire.The Eastern Empire, supported by fools and slaves and fops, and ruled by the worst and most incompetent of men and women, managed to endure and thrive for a thousand years more.

But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.

This short history should have something to satisfy every taste and perversion: action, treachery, fratricide and regicide, corruption, and bloodshed. It contains thirteen murders, the victims being mostly of one family. It lists the ways in which a man or an Empire may be surrounded and destroyed; and contains a veritable catalog of subversions and finely wrought treacheries—which the reader may be able to make use of in his own life.

It is said that—Arcadius having offered its weight in gold for the head of Gainas—King Uldin drew out the brains of Gainas and poured in molten lead to win a better bargain with his prize. This part of the story has been doubted, and for no better reason than that it had been told five hundred years earlier of the head of Gaius Gracchus—as though a good trick might not be pulled more than once.