It’s been said that actions speak louder than words, but words are still important. Especially the words of a fictional character. Today, I will be sharing my favorite quotes, not just from my own villains, but from one of my favorite verbal exchanges in all of literature. (As a quick word of warning, I’m a bit limited in what I share from my own books. I don’t want to spoil anything. Moreover, I’ll be quoting from my rough drafts, so don’t expect to find these exact quotes in the finished product.)
Let’s start with my own fantasy villains, an in particular with Commander Anai. If you’ll remember from my post several weeks ago, he’s the second in command of the elvish city-state of Galvettena. The elves are materialists, refusing to believe in anything supernatural. However, they are deeply scientific. During his audience with the main characters, Commander Anai is considerate and wants to help with the Fae Plague until it is revealed that something supernatural is causing people to fall ill. At this revelation, he chuckles and says, “Humans. You and your magic. You’ll never learn.”
I promise you, this statement works so much better in context.
The priest–whom I have decided to name Elder Cedomir–is the next villain. Elder Cedomir is a legalist, and an absolute jerk of a legalist at that. When asked to help the victims of the Fae Plague, he responds by saying, “The people are receiving divine retribution for their sins. The evil will be purged from among us. That is a good thing.” He then refuses to help them, either by aiding them with his own magic or by letting the physician Loren turn the church into a hospital.
No one likes Elder Cedomir.
Finally, the fae themselves. The fae are a bit like demons. Their words are carefully chosen to inflict the most fear and misery in those who hear them. I’ll spare you what Maywin hears, but Loren (the physician who dabbles in alchemy, literature, and other nerdy subjects) has exactly one on-screen interaction with the fae. And the words spoken to Loren by the fae are absolutely chilling: “For the suffering you’ll endure, and for the suffering you’ll inflict. I’ll save you. The best for last. You ought to be savored.”
Now, this coveres the villains from my fantasy book, but what about the rest of literature? There are plenty of good villains out there, and those villains have plenty of great lines. However, one of my favorite verbal exchanges in all of literature comes from one of C.S. Lewis’s less popular works called Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in his Space Trilogy. (This same villain has a great line in Perelandra, the second book in the series, but unless you read it in context it’s not nearly as terrifying.)
Essentially, there’s an evil scientist named Weston who kidnaps the main character, Edwin Ransom, and sends him to Mars. Mars is inhabited by normal terrestrial life-forms as well as by angelic beings called eldila. Towards the end of the book, when Weston is being accused of crimes before the eldil Oyarsa and is asked to explain his actions. However, Weston has a very poor grasp of the Martian language and Ransom has to translate for him, explaining how Weston wants to colonize Mars in an attempt to pursue human evolution and eventually immortality. The result is stunning. I’ll give you a snippet from the middle of this conversation.
Weston begins by saying, “Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilization.”
Ransom translates this as follows: “He says…that living creatures are stronger than the question whether an act is bent [evil] or good–no, that cannot be right–he says it is better to be alive and bent than to be dead–no…I cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language. But he goes on to say that the only good thing is that there should be very many creatures alive. He says there were many other animals before the first men and the latter ones were better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals were not born because of what is said to the young about bent and good action by their elders. And he says these animals do not feel any pity.”
Obviously, this makes more sense if you read the full book. Please do, it’s a good book. But I was stunned at how heroic Weston’s speech sounded before Ransom’s translation, and how evil it sounded afterwards. It helped teach me the power of words.
What’s your favorite villain quote? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don’t forget to review us on Amazon!