Quotes from Juliet Marillier

Not all were joyful tales; we needed to acknowledge that love was not just kisses, smiles, and fulfillment, but also sacrifice, compromise, and hard work.

I wept in self-pity, and because I knew you could never go back. You chose your path, and that was it.

Don't you long for something different to happen, something so exciting and new it carries you along with it like a great tide, something that lets your life blaze and burn so the whole world can see it? Something that touches you with joy or with terror, that lifts you out of your safe, little path and onto a great, wild road whose ending nobody knows? Don't you ever long for that?

I felt Red's arm close around me like a shield against the rest of the world. His mouth was against my hair, and his heart thumped violently under my cheek. I shut my eyes, and held onto his shirt with both hands, and wept.

Become my friend and you embrace a nightmare.

You bound him to you with your courage and your tales. You hold him to you now. You captured a wild creature when you had no place you could keep him.

Death, of course, should not be feared, but awaited with certain wonder. To die was to step across a threshold into a new world, unknown, unimaginable.

Bran held his voice level. In time, you will regret these words. You may hold me captive now, and believe me helpless. But each foulword you speak of her brings your death a little closer. --Bran to Eamonn

Some broken things you can't mend. Some you have to put together very slowly piece by fragile piece, waiting until the last bit of work is strong enough before you try the next. It takes a lot of patience.

A wonder tale can be truer than true, I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.

Ask us for any help you need...Let us be strong for you.

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

For the others, it was still just a tale, like all the tales we told, night by night, tales comical and strange, tales heroic and awe-inspiring, the tales that formed the fabric of our spirits.

Breath of the winds; dancing flame; peace of the earth; song of the waves.

There is no good or evil, save in the way you see the world. There is no dark or light save in your own.

You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bold; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life.

At the end of the parapet, a long black coat lay neatly folded on the wall. At the other end stood my sister and her lover. Tati's arms were wound around Sorrow's neck, her body pressed close to his, as if she would melt into him. His hands were enlaced in my sister's long hair as he strained her slight form against him, white on black. Their eyes were closed; their lips clung; they were lost in each other. It was beautiful and powerful. It was impossible.

Every ancient tale has truth at its heart, I said. That's what I've always believed, anyway. But after years and years of retelling, the shape of those old stories changes. What may once have been simple and easily recognized becomes strange, wondrous and magical. Those are only the trappings of the story. The truth lies beneath those fantastic garments.

I wanted so much to keep you safe. I did my best. I'm sorry things didn't come out different for the two of us. I wish I could have been good enough for you.

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.

I could not imagine living away from Sevenwaters, away from all that was so much a part of me. Maybe, if you cared enough about someone, you could do it and not feel your spirit torn in two. But the forest keeps her hold on all those who are born there, and they cannot travel far without the yearning in them to return.

The end of the story is of your making, nobody else's. You can do with it as you choose. There are as many paths open to your hero as branches on a great tree. They are wonderful and terrible, and plain and twisted. They touch and part and intermingle, and you can follow them whatever way you will.

Eat of my deep earth, drink of my living streams, for I am your Mother. Your heart is my wild drum, your breath my eternal song. If you would live, dance with me!

I thought of betrayal and how it came so easily - in a word, a glance, a gesture.