But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me – me, Jenny Gluckstein – like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing – recognition is something else.
Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it.
Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.
I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.
He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.
I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.
What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain – What is gone is gone.
It’s really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space – that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.
Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose – What is gone is gone.
The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.
I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art – not that it’s much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course.
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard’s castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts...
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.
Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn’t sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment.
Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.
For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker’s victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.
She touched you twice,′ he said in a little while. ‘The first touch was to bring you to life again, but the second was for you.
All lives are composed of two basic elements,” the squirrel said, “purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain – this is nothing beside a life without poetry.