Quotes from Elizabeth Knox

respond to that except by admitting it? 'Yes. My eyes are always stinging from the smoke of it.

That's Lucifer's heresy—that God didn't make the world, only found it. And that when He made angels it was an attempt to discover how people worked by copying them.

Taryn knew a lot of people whom she thought of as intellectual snobs. What they were, in fact, were people incapable of relinquishing their sovereign sense that their identity was tied up with what they understood and enjoyed. And they liked to stay sure of themselves, so they never read or watched anything outside what they already approved as good or enjoyable for them.

old horror writers—James, Chambers, Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood.

it seems impossible to me to describe even a short journey, for every step depends on other earlier steps and my whys and wherefores are as infinitesimal as atoms in the scent trails we leave in the air – negligible, not evidence, but there.

Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here.

We're not sure what his intentions are. He's not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.' Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. 'You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?' 'I do,' she said. 'Your wits seem intact in some matters.

Souls may be endemic to this part of the universe,' Aeng said, 'but so are flies. Flies far out at sea. Flies on mountaintops.

The tarn was surrounded by tough alpine grasses and thorn bushes with berries of candy pink and cough-drop red. At that camp the party's fire looked choked and small. And when the moon came out its light shone on and through the blue ice cliffs fastened to the black rock faces of surrounding mountains. The night breeze came as an icy downdraught carrying a scent of hostile nothingness, as if it blew all the way from the stars.

But among the poor and weak and old my strength is obscene. How can I live without a commitment to help at least some poor creature? It's pity someone or pity everyone. And, because it is impossible to act on universal pity, my pity is liable to evaporate. I keep the stopper in. For without pity, and among you, what would I be?

Lucifer maintains that, like earth, Hell was there already, inhospitable and ugly, but a whole real world. He says he first went to Hell about the same time God started to store souls there—and that he took to going there to be alone with his thoughts.

Demons are the oppressed native people of Hell,' Xas said. 'Fallen angels are their colonial masters. Demons are low creatures, and impossible to like—but I do think they deserve something better.

Xas wouldn't show Flora the fine print, because what all the old songs had to say was true—in Heaven there was no trouble

I mean, angels are unresponsive. They mind their business — which is as it should be.

He had gone to bed early, made love, then got up and washed – it wouldn't do to meet an angel while glazed in places with love's juices, like an egg-white coated Michaelmas bun.

Katharine Briggs's comprehensive The Fairies in Tradition and Literature.

There was no fate. There was what people tell others and those others believe. There was conspiracy and propaganda and inspiration, not fate. Fate was only someone else's idea of how the world worked, a story people inherit, a lie they're told. If he'd learned anything, Jacob thought, he'd learned that. That there was no thing that should be, that must be, even the world.

Lucifer has theories. What God makes are copies and distillations. A soul is a distilled human. Earth and purgatory are distilleries. My Niall

Xas explained. 'To make your mark is to fall to your death, splashing some farmer's field. He's saying I take big risks to make my mark, to finally lose my game with gravity.

trying to peddle its pots and pans at the door of this house.

He met her eyes and said, 'I mean—some things we've learnt might not make any kind of sense according to what we're used to seeing as sense, but they might work with the bits and pieces of knowledge we have.

I want today to give up being so smugly sure about what tomorrow won't need.

But that's just the news, isn't it. They make their money out of having ordinary people on the edge of their seats all the time and fretting over every little thing.' 'But

Surely it's better to be human and live with grief, than outgrow your humanity and learn to raise the dead too late to raise your own.