Quotes from Patricia A. McKillip

Her eyes filled with light, like sea-polished amber, and his throat constricted suddenly, too full of words.

Easier to understand the wind . . . Easier to walk on the surface of the frothing sea, than to remember the hunger to do it. Easier to remember knowledge than ignorance, experience than innocence. Easier to know what you are than remember what you were.

Morgon, I told you what I am; you could see what dark power I was waking in me—you knew its origins. You knew I am kin to those shape-changers who tried to kill you, you thought I was helping the man who had betrayed you—why in Hel's name did you trust me?" His hands, circling the gold crown on the skull, closed on the worn metal with sudden strength. "I don't know. Because I chose to. Then, and forever.

I heard you. Sometimes, in silence, at night, I hear the voices of things beyond eyesight, like echoes of ancient songs. I heard your voice, lonely in my dreams—it woke me, so I came. You see, I know how it is when you speak a name into an empty room with no one on earth to answer to it.

as if by tying a knot in a piece of string she was binding one stray piece of life to another, bridging by magic the confusing distances between things.

Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.

You can weave your life so long—only so long, and then a thing in the world out of your control will tug at one vital thread and leave you patternless and subdued.

Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart.

he felt the snow, downward groping of tree roots.

Lydea was a blown flame; Lydea was yesterday; Lydea, alone on the streets of Ombria, was already changing into something neither of them would recognize, if she survived to see them again.

You can't fight me." Tearle reminded him harshly. "I know." In the placid light, his face looked chilled and very weary. "But I can die.

I need you." "You must be careful," he whispered. "You must be so careful. Every need is a path to her.

She descended, not through the nearest hole as was her childhood habit, but more sedately down a marble staircase that began life in the upper world as an innocent stairway from a cellar door. Below, Faey complained about her tardiness, but was too busy to press for explanations. A gentleman from the palace had sent a request, with gold, for a method of detecting poison. Mag sighed. It would be a smelly afternoon.

This palace,' he had said, 'is a small city, past lying close to present like one shoe next to another. If you look at them in a mirror, left becomes right, present becomes past...

Is she crazy?" "No," he said simply. "But sometimes her sanity is terrifying.

Lydea found Mag's knowledge astonishing, and had gotten into the habit of taking lessons with the prince. They helped each other study, sometimes with the aid of puppets.

He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?

There was a drop of human blood in her, and in her father . . . it brought both of them visions at times, living dreams of the world beyond the wood. Her father had learned to ignore them, for they meant nothing to him. She, still learning words for her own world, did not make such distinctions: Everything was new, everything spoke to her and had a name; she had not yet learned that something could mean nothing.

He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again.

And then he left the palace to roam the streets of Ombria, where he painted shadows as he searched for light within them, painted thick, barred doors, as he searched in their hewn, scarred grains for what it was they hid, painted high windowless walls as if, rebuilding them stone by stone on paper, he could dismantle them and finally see the secret life behind the real.

He finally took his harp out of the cobwebs, walked out the door, and admitted who he was: the Unforgiven.

I thought that all magic has its price.' 'Magic does,' Faey said. 'But let us consider this an exchange of knowledge. I'll tell you what you want to know and you'll tell me why you want to know it.

That man would betray his own shadow. And for what? A child's tale.' 'Is it?' Mag looked at her. 'Is it only a tale?' For a moment, the purple eyes grew dark, black as the little rags of shadows that Mag saw on empty streets or patches of barren ground, attached to nothing, seemingly blown at random from some place adrift in light.

As she moved swiftly and noiselessly through the vast palace cellar, odd noises weltered toward her. Voices and echoes of water rippled through the air as if, in some magic chamber, whales and dolphins cavorted among young maidens in great tanks of water. When she reached it, all the fish turned into laundry, stirred and beaten in steaming cauldrons by glum, limp-haired women as wet as mackerels.