Quotes from Isobelle Carmody

I thought of the transcendent beauty of the first panel, and tried to understand how the ability to create such wondrous beauty could have become so perverted, so destructive. With power, my mind whispered.

I would not fail them.

I can just hear Aaron saying that it's slight compared with the big topics they usually tackle." "Slight!" I almost shouted. "Why is it that people always think bad, dark things are more real and important than things that lift you up and make you feel life is worth living? You ought to tell them that in a song.

Some foolish people must have a tragedy, for they cannot believe in happy endings

They feared one another because they knew what they were capable of doing, and maybe in some cases, had done. The more weapons they created, the more frightened they would have been of the weapons they imagined their enemies had created, and so they strove to make worse weapons, to discourage any attack. I don't think any of them imagined anyone would dare to use them and yet what other end could there be to it all?' 'They

It came to me then, like a chilly draught from an unseen gap, that I had always known in my deepest heart that it would be like this, a slipping away from a life full of people I had come to love, in a place I had helped to shape, in a land I had helped to free.

It struck me suddenly that rather than spending my time worrying about my destined quest, I should simply live and trust in the fates to bring me where I was needed.

And, for a moment, doubt flickered in me, but then I banished it, for surely nothing required courage so much as love, and I was equal to it.

Who knows where a cat goes?" he said philosophically.

It would be a simple matter if lives were lived by hindsight. There is much we would not begin, if we could see how it would end

All this is wonderful...but sometimes it seems like a pleasant dream that can't last. So many have died. It's a high price we pay for our place in the world. [Chapter 27, page 308]

They ask me to write down all I remember of the Glory days. A hard thing, because there is so much of Sorrow in the telling.

You are a gypsy, so you think it is only the freedom to move from place to place. Real freedom is a thing no one can take from you, because it is of the spirit. I keep it here. He tapped his head. [ Chapter 9, page 87]

The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.

Sometimes success demands a certain refined insanity.

Maruman does not loll.

It is better to pursue a hopeless hope than to give in to black despair.

That was what happened to laughter when you caged it. It became unbearably sad. It was worse than crying.

Don't you understand that wanting does not belong here, because that is what wounds, and there is never an end to it.

The worst predijudice is unknowing. We think we treat others as equals, but, in our deepest heart, we regard ourselves as superior. In part, this is because we are, in ways, powerful. But that does not make the race of humans (funanga) better than that of the dog or equine.

Never trust a mirror,' his mother had told him. 'They never tell the truth unless you make them.

Sometimes I am afraid for people like you who have to know things. Your kind will dig and hunt and worry at it until one day you will find what is hidden, waiting for you.

My heart belongs to you,' He promised. 'Would you have loved me when I was a girl?' 'I have always loved you. Even before I met you I loved the idea of you.

Life has always been a matter of putting one's feet down carefully