Bree the Horse Quotes

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”

″‘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.”

″‘My good Horse, you’ve lost nothing but your self-conceit. No, no, cousin. Don’t put back your ears and shake your mane at me. If you are really so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense. You’re not quite the great Horse you had come to think, from living among poor dumb horses. Of course you were braver and cleverer than them. You could hardly help being that. It doesn’t follow that you’ll be anyone very special in Narnia. But as long as you know you’re nobody special, you’ll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole.‘”

″‘In other words,’ it continued, ‘you can’t ride. That’s a drawback. I’ll have to teach you as we go along. If you can’t ride, can you fall?’ ‘I suppose anyone can fall,’ said Shasta. ‘I mean can you fall and get up again without crying and mount again and fall again and yet not be afraid of falling?‘”