“ Elphaba: I don’t believe in religious feast days, but they are pretty, though. Fiyero: You...

“
Elphaba: I don’t believe in religious feast days, but they are pretty, though.

Fiyero: You have no soul.

E: You’re right. I didn’t think it showed.

F: You’re only playing word games now.

E: No, what proof have I of a soul?

F: How can you have a conscience if you don’t have a soul?

E: How can a bird feed its young if it has no consciousness of before and after? A conscience, Yero my hero, is only consciousness in another dimension, the dimension of time. What you call conscience I prefer to call instinct. Birds feed their young without understanding why, without weeping about how all that is born must die, sob sob. I do my work with a similar motivation: the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety. I am a pack animal wheeling with the herd, that’s all. I’m a forgettable leaf on a tree.

F: Since your work is terrorism, that’s the most extreme argument for crime I’ve ever heard. You’re eschewing all personal responsibility. It’s as bad as those who sacrifice their personal will into the gloomy morasses of the unknowable will of some unnameable god. If you suppress the idea of personhood then you suppress the notion of individual culpability.

E: What is worse, Fiyero? Suppressing the idea of personhood or suppressing, through torture and incarceration and starvation, real living persons? Look: Would you worry about saving one precious sentimental portrait in a museum of fine arts when the city around you is on fire and real people are burning to death? Keep some proportion in all this!

F: But even some innocent bystander—say an annoying society dame—is a real person, not a portrait. Your metaphor is distracting and belittling, it’s a blind excuse for crime.

E: A society dame has chosen to parade herself as a living portrait. She must be treated as such. It’s her due. That denial of it, that’s your evil, to go back to the other day. I say you save the innocent bystander if you can, even if she’s a society dame, or he’s a captain of industry thriving mightily on all these repressive moves—but not, not, not at the expense of other, realer people. And if you can’t save them, you can’t. Everything costs.

F: I don’t believe in this concept of ‘real’ or ‘realer’ people.
”
#GregoryMaguire #Wicked #TheWickedYears Book 1 #BookWorm

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2mS4wSg