Possession
Jun. 1st, 2007 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amelia_petkovaMy second super-long entry of quotes, this time from Possession by A.S. Byatt, which is a novel that more people need to read. It's beautifully written, and makes one believe that fantastic things can happen during a doldrums life. Again, I put together the quotes list for myself, but feel free to use whatever you want (as I don't even own the book to begin with!).
Excerpt from “The Garden of Proserpina”
“The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow.” (3)
“It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair.”
“books traveled the aether like light and sound.” (4)
“Their edges, beyond the pages, were dyed soot-black, giving the impression of the borders of mourning cards.” (5)
“and copied parts onto an index card. He had two boxes of these, tomato-red and an intense grassy green, with springy plastic hinges that popped in the library silence.” (6)
“Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge.”
“I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly, that you and I must speak again.” (7)
“you will make something highly strange and original of it.” (8)
“She had enticed them in like an old witch” (21)
“’You have this thing about this dead man. Who had a thing about dead people. That’s OK but not everyone is very bothered about all that.’”
--Val (23)
“as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.” (30)
Roland: I think I’ve made a discovery.
Blackadder: It will probably turn out to have been discovered twenty times already. (34)
Poem by Christabel (40)
“her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes.” (44)
“The campus was fenny-flat, laid out like a kind of chess-board, redeemed by an imaginative water-gardener who had made a maze of channels and pools, randomly flowing across and around the rectangular grid. They were now clogged with fallen leaves, amongst which Koi carp pushed blunt pearly noses.” (44-45)
“who went down on one knee very gracefully to plug in a kettle, and produced from a cupboard two blue and white Japanese mugs.” (45-46)
“The journal was written in an excited and pretty hand, in short rushes.” (49)
“What draws us to make pretty what should express Brute Power?”
“the Princess”
“I paint so thinly, as though my work were unlit stained glass that requires a flood of light from beyond and behind to illuminate and enliven it.” (51)
“She is in no real need of epistolary adulation. She knows her own worth.”
“Letters, letters, letters. Not for me. I am not meant to see or know. I am no blink mouldiwarp, my Lady, nor no well-trained lady’s maid to turn my head and not see what is stated not to concern me. You need not hurry them away to lie in your sewing-basket or run upstairs to fold them under your handkerchiefs.” (52)
“Its face was blunt and furred and screwed up as though about to burst into tears. Its prickles were round its ugly head like spined rays of a halo, and descended its neckless shoulders, criss-crossing to meet the incongruity of a starched, frilled collar. It had blunt little claws on its stubby hands.” (59)
Poem by Christabel (60-61)
“’Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.’”
--Maud (61)
“’Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.’”
“She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her living room—not a heap of sleeping bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath.” (62)
“Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, the sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white.” (63)
“The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.”
“Fergus had divined how afraid she was of the doll-mask and had dealt with it in his own way, daring her to let it all hang out, quoting Yeats at her in his Irish voice.” (64)
“So he had dared her to grow it, and she had grown it, from eyebrow to ear to nape to the length of the neck to her shoulders. The growing had lasted the affair, almost exactly; when they parted, the long queue knocked on her spine.” (64-65)
“The room smelled of the ghost of wine and a hint of cinnamon.” (65)
“Roland, who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky, with chalk-white clouds.” (78)
Poem by Christabel (92-93)
“She handed this creature to Roland, who took it as he might have done a kitten, cradling it in the crook of his elbow.” (93)
“You may rest assured I will retain every least word, written or spoken, and all other things too, in the hard wax of my stubborn memory.” (99)
“Miss LaMotte has an unquestionable gift for making the flesh creep.” (132)
“Perhaps the most surprising touch is that the snake or fish is beautiful.” (135)
Poem by Christabel (142)
“Along the top of the window ran a luxuriating rose tree, bearing both white and red flowers and blood red fruit together.”
“In the centre of the table was an inkstand, with an empty silver pen tray, tarnished, and greenish glass vessels, containing dried black powder.” (143)
“Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going.” (145)
“I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink…”
“The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires.” (147)
Poem by Christabel (148-149)
“A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, sparkling and then gone.”
“Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.”
“Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle—hardly worth your thinking about—a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it.” (151)
“I am my own riddle.”
“certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years.” (152)
“at the heart of which was the pool where Christabel had seen the frozen gold and silver fish, put there to provide flashes of colour in the gloom—the darting genii of the place, Christabel had said. There was a stone seat, with its rounded snow-cushion which she did not disturb.” (156)
Poem by Christabel (156-157)
“Maud crouched on the rim of the pool, her briefcase standing in snow beside her, and scraped with an elegant gloved hand at the snow on the ice. The ice was ridged and bubbly and impure. Whatever was beneath it could not be seen. She moved her hand in little circles, polishing, and saw, ghostly and pale in the metal-dark surface a woman’s face, her own, barred like the moon under mackerel clouds, waving up at her.” (157)
“’What my mother used to call a chilly mortal.’”
--Joan Bailey (159)
“Cold air seemed to pour down the stone steps like silky snow.”
“Maud’s arms were full of files, clasped against her like a breast-plate.” (161)
“He put out the light and watched it all go grey—many greys, silver, pewter, lead—in the suddenly visible moonlight, in which the snowfall was both thicker, more animated and slower.” (164)
“the touch of her cool fingers was the kiss of moths, or cool linen after a hard day’s work.” (172)
“It is not written at White Heat—as others have been.” (187)
“I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale.” (193)
“But you are never content to leave it there…your world is haunted by voiceless shapes…and wandering Passions…and little fluttering Fears…more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch.” (194)
“Have you truly Weighed—what you ask of me?” (195)
“If I address you So—it is for the Last Time as well as for the first. We have rushed down a Slope—I at least have Rushed—where we might have descended more circumspectly—or Not at All even.” (202)
“What else have you so mischievously misrepresented to me?” (208)
“The clashing together of our umbrella-spines as we leaned to speak” (209)
“Never have I felt such a concentration of my whole Being—on one object, in one place, at one time—a blessed eternity of momentariness that went on forever, it seemed.” (210)
“I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messenger from some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth—my Love—there, it is said—for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world” (211)
“I see whole bevies of shooting stars—like gold arrows before my darkening eyes”
“Before Migraine-headaches there is a moment of madness.” (213)
“I think your house did not love me, and I should not have come.” (216)
Poem by Christabel (219)
Poem by Christabel (229)
“’fibre-glass copy of the Sphinx.’”
--Roland (230)
“We are a Faustian generation, my dear—we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.” (234)
“’When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid—oh, I think of it as panelling.’”
--Beatrice (240)
“’There is an age at which, I profoundly believe, one becomes a witch, in such situations, Dr. Bailey.’”
--Beatrice (241)
Poem by Ash (249)
“A Poet is not a Divine being, with an angelic vision.” (251)
“’Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair.’”
--Maud (258)
“Roland’s bedroom had blue-sprigged wallpaper and a sloping roof. The roof was uneven and creaky; the door was old with a latch and sneck as well as a monumental keyhole. The bed was high, with a stained dark wooden head. Roland looked round this small private place and felt a moment of pure freedom.” (264)
“He moved down into their whiteness, scissoring his legs like a swimmer, abandoning himself to them, floating free.” (268)
“’Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and decorum.’”
--Maud
“’Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems.’”
--Maud
“’Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world?’”
--Roland (275)
“Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in air” (286)
“Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.”
“’Sometimes I feel that the best state is to be without desire.’”
--Roland (290)
“’Life is so short. It has a right to breathe.’”
--Roland (295)
“And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes, and saw scarlet blood.” (296)
Poem by Ash (297)
Poem by Christabel (314-323)
“They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool.” (326)
Poem by Christabel (332)
“thought they looked bizarrely cultish, in floating skirts and scarfed heads, brandishing their totemic beasts.” (346)
Poem by Christabel (358-360)
“’All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.’”
--Maud
“’Oddly, if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad.’”
--Maud (360)
“All this giddy clear-headedness is dependant on our not being obsessed with each other.”
--Roland’s thought (361)
“He saw her ankles as she climbed the ladder, white and fine, in white cotton and an air of fern-scented powder and damp hair.” (361-362)
“lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening voluptuously for small creaks and rustles, sighing and shifting.” (362)
“The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin?” (364)
“In this misty land the borderline between myth, legend and face is not decisive” (368)
“I want to live and love and write.” (369)
“I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.” (376)
“How shall I describe the happiness of being taken seriously?” (378)
“And Gode’s telling is a play with all these things, with the firelight and the gesturing shadows and the streamers of light and dark”
“men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.”
“’Who knows what Melusina was in her freedom with no eyes on her?’”
--Christabel (404)
Poems by Christabel (411-415)
“we all have, my dear friend, an infinite capacity to be deceived by desire” (421)
Poem by Ash (438-445)
“’And I wanted to see you smile. You were torturing a lovely face into an expression of permanent disappointment, and soon it would have been too late.’”
--Euan (450)
“They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, ‘in love,’ romantic love”
“He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.” (458)
“On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.” (459)
“She felt the fuzz of his soft black hair, starting up above his brow, with imaginary fingers.” (466)
“If he went out of the room it would be grey and empty. If he did not go out of it, how could she concentrate?” (467)
“I live in a Turret like an old Witch, and make verses nobody wants.” (489)
“It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex.” (510)
“Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” (511)
“Nobody met anyone else’s eye; it was very English.” (532)
“kissed the inside of the girl’s wrists.” (534)
“The photograph was stained at the edges and covered with silvery dashes like a storm of hailstones or white blossom, and with circles of dark sooty markings, like the infestations of mirrors.” (541-542)
“All History is hard facts—and something else—possession and colour lent by men.” (542)
“they could smell each other’s hair, full of the smells of the storm, rain and troubled clay and crushed and flying leafage.” (548)
“’What a coward you are after all. I’ll take care of you, Maud.’”
--Roland (550)
“And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he hears, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.
“In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.” (550-551)
“There are things that happen and leave no discernable trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, as though such things had never been.” (552)
Excerpt from “The Garden of Proserpina”
“The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow.” (3)
“It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair.”
“books traveled the aether like light and sound.” (4)
“Their edges, beyond the pages, were dyed soot-black, giving the impression of the borders of mourning cards.” (5)
“and copied parts onto an index card. He had two boxes of these, tomato-red and an intense grassy green, with springy plastic hinges that popped in the library silence.” (6)
“Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge.”
“I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly, that you and I must speak again.” (7)
“you will make something highly strange and original of it.” (8)
“She had enticed them in like an old witch” (21)
“’You have this thing about this dead man. Who had a thing about dead people. That’s OK but not everyone is very bothered about all that.’”
--Val (23)
“as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.” (30)
Roland: I think I’ve made a discovery.
Blackadder: It will probably turn out to have been discovered twenty times already. (34)
Poem by Christabel (40)
“her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes.” (44)
“The campus was fenny-flat, laid out like a kind of chess-board, redeemed by an imaginative water-gardener who had made a maze of channels and pools, randomly flowing across and around the rectangular grid. They were now clogged with fallen leaves, amongst which Koi carp pushed blunt pearly noses.” (44-45)
“who went down on one knee very gracefully to plug in a kettle, and produced from a cupboard two blue and white Japanese mugs.” (45-46)
“The journal was written in an excited and pretty hand, in short rushes.” (49)
“What draws us to make pretty what should express Brute Power?”
“the Princess”
“I paint so thinly, as though my work were unlit stained glass that requires a flood of light from beyond and behind to illuminate and enliven it.” (51)
“She is in no real need of epistolary adulation. She knows her own worth.”
“Letters, letters, letters. Not for me. I am not meant to see or know. I am no blink mouldiwarp, my Lady, nor no well-trained lady’s maid to turn my head and not see what is stated not to concern me. You need not hurry them away to lie in your sewing-basket or run upstairs to fold them under your handkerchiefs.” (52)
“Its face was blunt and furred and screwed up as though about to burst into tears. Its prickles were round its ugly head like spined rays of a halo, and descended its neckless shoulders, criss-crossing to meet the incongruity of a starched, frilled collar. It had blunt little claws on its stubby hands.” (59)
Poem by Christabel (60-61)
“’Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.’”
--Maud (61)
“’Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.’”
“She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her living room—not a heap of sleeping bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath.” (62)
“Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, the sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white.” (63)
“The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.”
“Fergus had divined how afraid she was of the doll-mask and had dealt with it in his own way, daring her to let it all hang out, quoting Yeats at her in his Irish voice.” (64)
“So he had dared her to grow it, and she had grown it, from eyebrow to ear to nape to the length of the neck to her shoulders. The growing had lasted the affair, almost exactly; when they parted, the long queue knocked on her spine.” (64-65)
“The room smelled of the ghost of wine and a hint of cinnamon.” (65)
“Roland, who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky, with chalk-white clouds.” (78)
Poem by Christabel (92-93)
“She handed this creature to Roland, who took it as he might have done a kitten, cradling it in the crook of his elbow.” (93)
“You may rest assured I will retain every least word, written or spoken, and all other things too, in the hard wax of my stubborn memory.” (99)
“Miss LaMotte has an unquestionable gift for making the flesh creep.” (132)
“Perhaps the most surprising touch is that the snake or fish is beautiful.” (135)
Poem by Christabel (142)
“Along the top of the window ran a luxuriating rose tree, bearing both white and red flowers and blood red fruit together.”
“In the centre of the table was an inkstand, with an empty silver pen tray, tarnished, and greenish glass vessels, containing dried black powder.” (143)
“Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going.” (145)
“I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink…”
“The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires.” (147)
Poem by Christabel (148-149)
“A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, sparkling and then gone.”
“Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.”
“Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle—hardly worth your thinking about—a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it.” (151)
“I am my own riddle.”
“certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years.” (152)
“at the heart of which was the pool where Christabel had seen the frozen gold and silver fish, put there to provide flashes of colour in the gloom—the darting genii of the place, Christabel had said. There was a stone seat, with its rounded snow-cushion which she did not disturb.” (156)
Poem by Christabel (156-157)
“Maud crouched on the rim of the pool, her briefcase standing in snow beside her, and scraped with an elegant gloved hand at the snow on the ice. The ice was ridged and bubbly and impure. Whatever was beneath it could not be seen. She moved her hand in little circles, polishing, and saw, ghostly and pale in the metal-dark surface a woman’s face, her own, barred like the moon under mackerel clouds, waving up at her.” (157)
“’What my mother used to call a chilly mortal.’”
--Joan Bailey (159)
“Cold air seemed to pour down the stone steps like silky snow.”
“Maud’s arms were full of files, clasped against her like a breast-plate.” (161)
“He put out the light and watched it all go grey—many greys, silver, pewter, lead—in the suddenly visible moonlight, in which the snowfall was both thicker, more animated and slower.” (164)
“the touch of her cool fingers was the kiss of moths, or cool linen after a hard day’s work.” (172)
“It is not written at White Heat—as others have been.” (187)
“I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale.” (193)
“But you are never content to leave it there…your world is haunted by voiceless shapes…and wandering Passions…and little fluttering Fears…more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch.” (194)
“Have you truly Weighed—what you ask of me?” (195)
“If I address you So—it is for the Last Time as well as for the first. We have rushed down a Slope—I at least have Rushed—where we might have descended more circumspectly—or Not at All even.” (202)
“What else have you so mischievously misrepresented to me?” (208)
“The clashing together of our umbrella-spines as we leaned to speak” (209)
“Never have I felt such a concentration of my whole Being—on one object, in one place, at one time—a blessed eternity of momentariness that went on forever, it seemed.” (210)
“I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messenger from some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth—my Love—there, it is said—for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world” (211)
“I see whole bevies of shooting stars—like gold arrows before my darkening eyes”
“Before Migraine-headaches there is a moment of madness.” (213)
“I think your house did not love me, and I should not have come.” (216)
Poem by Christabel (219)
Poem by Christabel (229)
“’fibre-glass copy of the Sphinx.’”
--Roland (230)
“We are a Faustian generation, my dear—we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.” (234)
“’When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid—oh, I think of it as panelling.’”
--Beatrice (240)
“’There is an age at which, I profoundly believe, one becomes a witch, in such situations, Dr. Bailey.’”
--Beatrice (241)
Poem by Ash (249)
“A Poet is not a Divine being, with an angelic vision.” (251)
“’Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair.’”
--Maud (258)
“Roland’s bedroom had blue-sprigged wallpaper and a sloping roof. The roof was uneven and creaky; the door was old with a latch and sneck as well as a monumental keyhole. The bed was high, with a stained dark wooden head. Roland looked round this small private place and felt a moment of pure freedom.” (264)
“He moved down into their whiteness, scissoring his legs like a swimmer, abandoning himself to them, floating free.” (268)
“’Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and decorum.’”
--Maud
“’Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems.’”
--Maud
“’Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world?’”
--Roland (275)
“Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in air” (286)
“Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.”
“’Sometimes I feel that the best state is to be without desire.’”
--Roland (290)
“’Life is so short. It has a right to breathe.’”
--Roland (295)
“And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes, and saw scarlet blood.” (296)
Poem by Ash (297)
Poem by Christabel (314-323)
“They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool.” (326)
Poem by Christabel (332)
“thought they looked bizarrely cultish, in floating skirts and scarfed heads, brandishing their totemic beasts.” (346)
Poem by Christabel (358-360)
“’All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.’”
--Maud
“’Oddly, if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad.’”
--Maud (360)
“All this giddy clear-headedness is dependant on our not being obsessed with each other.”
--Roland’s thought (361)
“He saw her ankles as she climbed the ladder, white and fine, in white cotton and an air of fern-scented powder and damp hair.” (361-362)
“lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening voluptuously for small creaks and rustles, sighing and shifting.” (362)
“The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin?” (364)
“In this misty land the borderline between myth, legend and face is not decisive” (368)
“I want to live and love and write.” (369)
“I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.” (376)
“How shall I describe the happiness of being taken seriously?” (378)
“And Gode’s telling is a play with all these things, with the firelight and the gesturing shadows and the streamers of light and dark”
“men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.”
“’Who knows what Melusina was in her freedom with no eyes on her?’”
--Christabel (404)
Poems by Christabel (411-415)
“we all have, my dear friend, an infinite capacity to be deceived by desire” (421)
Poem by Ash (438-445)
“’And I wanted to see you smile. You were torturing a lovely face into an expression of permanent disappointment, and soon it would have been too late.’”
--Euan (450)
“They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, ‘in love,’ romantic love”
“He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.” (458)
“On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.” (459)
“She felt the fuzz of his soft black hair, starting up above his brow, with imaginary fingers.” (466)
“If he went out of the room it would be grey and empty. If he did not go out of it, how could she concentrate?” (467)
“I live in a Turret like an old Witch, and make verses nobody wants.” (489)
“It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex.” (510)
“Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” (511)
“Nobody met anyone else’s eye; it was very English.” (532)
“kissed the inside of the girl’s wrists.” (534)
“The photograph was stained at the edges and covered with silvery dashes like a storm of hailstones or white blossom, and with circles of dark sooty markings, like the infestations of mirrors.” (541-542)
“All History is hard facts—and something else—possession and colour lent by men.” (542)
“they could smell each other’s hair, full of the smells of the storm, rain and troubled clay and crushed and flying leafage.” (548)
“’What a coward you are after all. I’ll take care of you, Maud.’”
--Roland (550)
“And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he hears, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.
“In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.” (550-551)
“There are things that happen and leave no discernable trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, as though such things had never been.” (552)
