Quotes from Patricia A. McKillip

When he held a candle across the threshold, the black swallowed the fire completely. When he tried to step across it, he felt nothing beneath his foot. Sometimes he heard rain, a bird-cry, wind soughing through tall trees; mostly he was aware only of an intimation of vastness, silence, as though he stood at the edge of a world. He saw nothing. So he let the charcoal imagine what might lie on the other side of the door.

The Shadow of the Emperor The Hooded One Who unmasked night Who laid the stars like paving stones Who rode the Thunderbolt Down the star-cobbled path into day Was Kane, The Emperor's twin Silent, as lightning is silent, Before the thunder speaks.

He is not here to help me with this; you must take his place.' Ducon started to speak, faltered. He stared at her, the bruise on his face suddenly vivid against his pallor, as if she had struck him.

I saw a man once leap into a pit to see how deep it was, he commented. But no doubt you are wiser.

He could think no longer; he leaned against his shadow. The silence within the slab of ancient stone eased through him; his thoughts, worn meaningless, became quiet again.

I was so tired of being touched and then forgotten, of hearing my name spoken and then not, as if I were only real when I was looked at, and just something to forget after that, like you never remember the flowers you toss away.

He turned reluctantly, driven away by the cold, but still listening until he passed into noisy spring again and found his way back home. He took the silence with him, though; he heard it in his dreams, where a part of him waited patiently for the ancient dreamers to speak a word as old and slow as stone.

He assumed his stillness like a shield, impervious and impenetrable; she wondered if it hid a total stranger or someone as familiar as to her as his name.

his unending ambition to find death and conquer it or become it, which, poets said later, became the same thing in the end.

He had, she realized slowly, a gift for silence. When he chose, it seemed to ebb out of him, the word silence of old trees or stones lying motionless for years. It was measured to his breathing, in his motionless, scarred hands. He moved abruptly, soundlessly, and it flowed with him as he turned...

He gave a good yell, for Baba Yaga at her best caused strong windows to crack and fall out of their frames. From Baba Yaga and the Sorcerer's son

she was, like the paintings and marble pillars, a background detail in the house of the Basilisk. Only her bowing, the unexpected, enthusiastic shrieks she got out of the peasant's instrument, made her incongruous, and therefore real.

That sleep that has no language, No dream, No time, No end.

The mage, Tessera decided finally, felt like someone who had stepped with confidence onto a stair that wasn't there.

This bond I draw between you: that though you are parted in mind or in body, there will be a call in the core of you, one to the other, that nothing, no one else will answer to. By the secrets of earth and water, this bond is woven, unbreakable, irrevocable; by the law that created fire and wind this call is set in you, in life and beyond life . . .

He glimpsed her familiar face then, very clearly, vivid and flushed with passion. 'Don't do that,' he warned. 'Don't look like that.' 'Like what?' 'Don't feel. It's a stronger spell than the sorceress's.

Like water, tales find their own paths; they go where they are needed.

He smiled again, his eyes still secret, like the well, which, suddenly, was no longer there. "You would know. You are drawn to secrets.

You look like her, in that dress," our father told me shyly, unaccustomed to complimenting me. He added, as I stepped on his foot, "You don't dance like her." "I haven't had her practice." I said amiably.

The rains began. Hard, constant, they battered the fields, turned the roads to mud, crushed the gold leaves into the ground and turned them black. In the wood, the sodden trees and brambles bowed beneath the torrents.

Riding my calm dark mare, I was armed and in disguise: shod, braided, cloaked and hooded in green wool against the rain.

I could barely do more than watch the rich tapestry they were of their glances and slow smiles, the words they spoke that said one thing to my father, and another to me, while the ivy, growing secretly all around us, whispered warnings.

They rode horses as white as hoarfrost. Snow and star and dark whipped around one another to etch a fine-boned face, eyes of night and crystal fire. Their mantles were of dark wind and snow; their wild hair caught snow and falling stars. The boy watched them, too, longing for their beauty, their mastery over cold and storm. Come to us. This is not your true home. You belong elsewhere. You belong with us.

I saw meadows and trees burning a young, fiery green, as if leaves had just opened, as if green itself had never existed before. I breathed heavy, golden air that might have pooled all summer over roses blooming in every color on a hundred trees.