Aravis Quotes

″‘Bree,’ said Aravis, who was not very interested in the cut of his tail,‘I’ve been wanting to ask you something for a long time. Why do you keep on swearing By The Lion and By The Lion’s Mane? I thought you hated lions.’ ‘So I do,’ answered Bree. ‘But when I speak of THE Lion, of course I mean Aslan, the great deliverer of Narnia who drove away the Witch and the Winter. All Narnians swear by him.’ ‘But is he a lion?’ ‘No, no, of course not,’ said Bree in a rather shocked voice. ‘All the stories about him in Tashbaan say he is,’ replied Aravis. ‘And if he isn’t a lion why do you call him a lion?’ ‘Well, you’d hardly understand it at your age,’ said Bree.”

″‘Why do you keep talking to my horse instead of to me?’ said the girl. ‘Excuse me, Tarkheena,’ said Bree (with just the slightest backward tilt of his ears), ‘but that’s Calormene talk. We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia, you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.’ The girl opened her mouth to speak and then stopped. Obviously she had not quite seen it in that light before.”

″‘When this news was brought to me ...[I] caused my mare Hwin to be saddled and took with me a sharp dagger... And when my father’s house was out of sight and I was come to a green open place in a certain wood where there were no dwellings of men, I dismounted from Hwin my mare and took out the dagger. Then I parted my clothes where I thought the readiest way lay to my heart and I prayed to all the gods that as soon as I was dead I might find myself with my brother. After that I shut my eyes and prepared to drive the dagger into my heart.‘”

“Although Lasaraleen had said she was dying to hear Aravis’s story, she showed no sign of really wanting to hear it at all. She was, in fact, much better at talking than at listening... The fuss she made about choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad. She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip.”

″‘I was the lion ... I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.‘”

″‘It was I who wounded you,’ said Aslan. ‘I am the only lion you met in all your journeyings. Do you know why I tore you?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘The scratches on your back, tear for tear, throb for throb, blood for blood, were equal to the stripes laid on the back of your stepmother’s slave because of the drugged sleep you cast upon her. You needed to know what it felt like.’

“Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”

“Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”