I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.
Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally – oh, very rarely! – the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.
What always was must always be.
One man’s bane is another’s bliss.
No man can be convinced when he will not.
I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.
I have gone into yesterday and tomorrow and both were as real as today – which is like the dreams of ghosts!
Men are but men, and the greatest men are they who soonest learn the simpler things.
In the hill country, civilization steals in last, and the people retain much of the crude but vigorous mode of expression of the colonial days and earlier.
I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.
While we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it.
But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood, restless harbingers of violence and bloodshed, knowing no other path...
I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.
In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.
There is always a way, if the desire be coupled with courage,” answered the Cimmerian.
When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy.
They trapped the Lion on Shamu’s plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, “The lion is caged at last!” Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! – Old Ballad.
It was passed on by the hook-nosed herdsmen of the grasslands, from the dwellers in tents to the dwellers in the squat stone cities where kings with curled blueblack beards worshipped round-bellied gods with curious rites.
They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls.