Quotes from Betsy James

No. Silence is something. This is nothing. Why couldn't I hear it before? I think it has been there always. From the beginning of time.' He put out his hand and stubbed it on my arm, stared at it. 'At the end of the world, at the beginning of the world; under the sea and over the sky; at the root and crown of the universe: nothing. At all. That's what I heard. What I hear.' He leaned forward. 'Do you understand?

I am dying,' she said. 'I want you to paint the goddess on my hand. When I go to that other land I shall hold up my hand—' she held it up 'and greet her. She has given me a good life.'… 'Aye,' said the old woman. 'Imoy, there she is. Here we paint her looking down to see us, but this is better. Her eyes are open, she will know me.

Every holy passage leaves a scar.

The soul's hand has an eye. *Carved on a rain-worn stone.* Welling-in-the-Mountains.

He gazed at me, grave and straight. With a shock I realized he was perfectly sane. He had just fallen through, all at once, into a deeper layer of himself—as if he had crashed through rotten floorboards into the basement.

But behind Nall's abandoned face he was sinking, as if he held a stone that he would not let go of though it dragged him under.

The high fear was over, and nothing was left but the fear that never stops, the one that asks and asks, *How shall I stay alive today?*

All deaths seem terrible to the one who dies.

Where do the winds go? What does the rain know? Where is the egg when the bird has flown? Where does the moon sleep? What makes the sea deep? Where is the soul when the breast is bone? What makes the mouth sing? What loves listening? Where is the tune when the song is done? Where is our joined heart, when at last our hands part And we have returned to be sea, to be sun?

I am whole," said Raím. "Broken and whole are the same.

The air changed. It had been dry, the Hill air I had grown used to. All in a moment the breeze went moist and soft, like a hand laid against me. I smelled salt and iodine, fish and weed, the coast and all that dwells there—its countless lives.

The clerestories were soft with evening light. Through them, to the east, I saw something invisible from the road: a short gibbet. From it a bundle dangled, turning a little. A crow picked at it. At first I thought nothing because I could think nothing. Then I thought, So that's what smells.

I heard she married some hunter, well, they all marry hunters, so did I, ha! You're just as foolish I expect, young girls are, some lad catches your eye and there's your whole life gone, snap, a lap full of babies and grandbabies and it's all over, you're an old woman knitting at the hearth and that's it, that's it!' I could not wait to get out of there. She shrank my whole life to the size of a poppy seed, and ate it.

A tidal wave is caused by the snapping of tension that has built for a long time,' said Nondany. "An earthquake under the sea. To be caught in a tidal wave is not to be its cause.

There is only one thing to know. The manat is *you.* A little skin and bone to keep the sea out—but you are its weight, its balance. You and I.

The line of his cheek bunched in a smile. My heart made a little lurch toward him. But if I let it move, it would spill its cargo into the sea of pain, so I held it still again, tight and cold.

Another face shone through his man's face, like a stone through running water.

Because I was too afraid, I walked to the corpse and looked at it. It was bad. Then not so bad—a man turning into bone.

From cold or horror I could not speak. The sodden blanket was heavy, the coldness in my heart flowed out and turned the whole world cold—there was no warm place. The thoughts I had frozen in order not to feel them grew monstrous, freezing everything else.

Duuni let her questions fall and rode on toward wherever it was she was supposed to go, watching the mountain change slowly, like a jewel turned in the light.

The real thing was how I felt: like a root groping in darkness for water it knows is there, that it must have. Nall was that water.

I am the heart that heals the stone

I shoved my feet under the sheets and against her thigh until she fell off the bed onto the floor. That was another thing she had taught me: that when you love someone, you must jokingly mistreat them, just a little. It makes it easier when you leave them, or they die.