Quotes from Alison MacLeod

The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.

He decides it is better to die in Ireland than in Paris because in Ireland the outdoors looks like the outdoors and gravestones are mossy and chipped, and the letters wear down with the wind and the rain so everyone gets forgotten in time, and life flies on.

To imagine wasn't to escape but to go deeper; to see through to the secret life of the world.

Fairies weren't always pretty mites. That was just tales people told for babies.

There is no invasion as fearful as love, no havoc like desire. Its fuse trembles in the human heart and runs through to the core of the world. What are our defences to it?

Readers are keepers of secrets: as an illicit page is turned, as a dangerous truth is inferred. The pulse quickens. Something explosive ticks between the lines. There is an intake of breath; the voyeur's silent flare of recognition. All the while, his or her face is impassive, unremarkable even, because like all subversives, readers lead careful double lives.

A good story was a form of communication, mind to mind, spirit to spirit. It sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across space, decades and centuries. Human sympathy -- human attention -- had magic in it. Any real story fizzed with sympathy -- the writer's and reader's -- across time, over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.

Any good photo is a secret of a secret. It's the unknowable glimpsed within a glimpse, the puzzle in plain sight. It's the question that makes us look for an answer we're never going to find. An open case. An unsolved mystery. A good still is never still - it's restive, alive.

High above, the oracle of the moon rose in the watchful night.