But you must stop playing among his ghosts – it’s stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He’s trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It’s not nice, and it’s not fair.
I write fantasy because it’s there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.
I don’t teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true.
There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun.
I do not want to choose which one of you I must love or hate. Here, I am free to do neither. I want no part of your bitterness.
Wisdom never learned silence, and it is most annoying when least wanted.
I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.
It’s so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart; you can’t see beyond yourself.
Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria’s past. Parts of the city’s past lay within time’s reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries.
Sorry, he said penitently. It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.
I wish you were small again, so I could hold you in my arms and comfort you. But you are grown, and you know that for some things there is no comfort.
A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.
Every moment is like a wheel with a hundred spokes in it. We ride always at the hub of the wheel and go forward as it turns. We ignore the array of other moments constantly turning around us. We are surrounded by doorways; we never open them.
When you open your mind and hands and heart to the knowing of a thing, there is no room in you for fear.
In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes.
Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel.
I need you to forgive me. And then perhaps I can begin to forgive myself. There is no one but you who can do that either.
Do you want a half-truth or truth?” “Truth.” “Then you will have to trust me.” His voice was suddenly softer than the fire sounds, melting into the silence within the stones. “Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me.” Morgon.
It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition of it.
I did not know, until then, that you could disappear into someone’s gaze, that bone and heart and breath could melt like shadow into light, until only light was left.