Quotes from Patricia McKillip

I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that.

She had begun to bake to have her eyes looking at a bowl, a flour bin, an oven, a fire, a face, anything but water. Her hands shaped loaves like scallop shells, like moon shells, like starfish; she ate them as if she ate the sea, to make it part of her, to transform bone to shell and lose herself in it, eyeless, thoughtless, wrapped in memories and anchored on some hoary rock against the currents of the deep.

You were crying. It's a terrible thing, loving the sea. Yes, she whispered, her eyes straying to it. Waves gathered and broke invisibly in the dark, reaching toward her, pulling back. They were never silent, they never spoke.

His mind was spinning endless threads of conjecture that snarled constantly around his ignorance.

Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.

But even in the schoolyard I'd been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he'd been raised by foxes and language was his second language.