Quotes from Elizabeth Knox

I wish I could make a better job of my clothes. My mother taught me about weather and tides, she taught me eight languages and how to make various medicines, but she never thought to teach me to spin and weave and sew, because I was a boy. It seems silly now.

Of course, any map of the Place would be shocking to anyone with any understanding of geography. As you can see, this is a map of no earthly geography." -

Perhaps, in a world too full of people, she was the one too many.

He said, 'Don't mind what happened to me. Don't be angry. I'm a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.

I guess I should have said that you're a tragic loss because your brains were yours and yours alone. You were the one who could pull the sword out of the stone. And you gave it all up.

It'll turn out you mean love,' Sholto said. 'At the moment math is the only thing that excites you so you're nosing around numbers as if numbers are life. But in two years you'll be telling me about some boy.

You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible.

I don't know whether you know this, but there are people in the world with a very odd gift, one that looks like crossed wires. These people firmly believe that every number has a color, and every sound a shape...

because what good would it do when a true understanding of what was in store for them couldn't save them from any of it?

Sobran wondered whether the angel was trying to follow his feelings about age or those of humans in general. He felt that he had to get his answer right, so he thought for a time before he told Xas, "It's as if I can no longer fit the space I've made for myself in the world. Yes--I've shrunk inside the space I've made.

Taryn sighed. 'You know, there were always people who found cause for complaint about falling birth rates whenever women in developing nations got educations and the means of supporting themselves.

Everyone is going to want to come and look at my garden.' 'Give them seeds or cuttings and send them off,' Shift said. 'Tell them the Little God of the Marshlands says they should grow their own gardens.' 'That's good,' Addy said. 'People here respect gods.

Shift laughed. 'The ways in which you want to think badly of me are interesting.' 'Who eats mice?

Xas found himself saying, 'There really isn't any afterlife, is there?' 'Are you asking the Governor of God's prison whether he actually

He said, 'Sooner or later one of Them is going to try to explain Himself to me. God—or Lucifer. But though there may be a reason why my wings were cut off, a reason for doing it, and for letting it be done, the reason is nothing compared to the act. The world of the act is a different one from the world of the reason.

The day was so lovely that, to Flora, it seemed possible to leave only if it was impossible to stay. She tried to imagine leaving. She imagined that her body was asking her to leave. She

everything sustaining would last.

A book for the general reader on an esoteric subject has to argue for its own interestingness by being interesting. And never argue for its own importance, which a work of scholarship may do. I consider the balancing act of "being accessible" a discipline rather than a limitation.

Then, for an instant, he was engulfed in the vivid patience, the impersonal benevolence, and the personal affection of his Father. He was reminded: 'You followed Lucifer in order to follow his thinking.

The fallen angels arrived in Hell when they were thrown out of Heaven?' 'That's right.' 'They took over.' 'A small number of angels is stronger than a great number of demons. They're like the men with the guns. Except no one can take their guns.

There's no point in just providing a spectacle. There's no point in changing people's minds or even their world views, but not having the means to change the world. That's just acting in bad faith.

He could contemplate, in a sentimental way, the idea of his wife, children and grandchildren arranged, well-dressed and weeping decorously, around his grave. His lovers, she ten years his junior and a handsome woman, and the lovely immortal, he imagined them disentangling their feet from his ribcage and walking on. It

People who read Taryn's book often quoted Heine: '"Where they have burned books at the end they will burn people." That's what your book is about,' he said. 'That's where its whole argument leads.

But the destruction of books is a gesture and a threat. It's like saying to the people of those books: You're next.