Home > Topic > The mermaid
1 " Last night at Bingo, Sylvia won the last prize. 'What am I going to do with a mermaid?" " Learn to swim in the murkiest water, reinvent yourself," the mermaid said #149 "
2 " I’m going to tell you a story,” she whispered. “There once was a beautiful woman named Amber, who lived alone in a far away land between the sea and the sky. Anyone that passed by knew that Amber was special. But there was one who adored her most of all.” She paused and smiled down at me. “Whenever Amber went down to the ocean and bathed her body, whenever she dipped her long fingers into the waves, the mermaid that lived in the deep water beyond the reef would swim close and watch her. Each day the mermaid came a little closer until finally, she emerged from the water and said hello.” “Just like you did,” I whispered. “Shhh.” She held her finger to my lips. “When Amber saw the mermaid, she was very curious. More curious perhaps, than she’d ever been about anyone. The mermaid was even more curious about Amber. No other woman had ever seemed so perfect and so pure. Every time the mermaid looked at Amber her desire grew like wildfire. Amber hadn’t yet learned all the slippery ways of the world,” She said softly as she dipped her thumb between my lips. I sighed as she pressed into me. “The mermaid could tell that Amber was still afraid. So the mermaid decided to take a chance. She gave Amber a single kiss and hoped that Amber would see her for who she really was. "
3 " He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature.And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Navaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.)We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak.But we hear. "
― Susan Griffin , Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
4 " And strange were the tales of the pond in the meadow,And eager we listened with eyes opened wideTo Those tales often told by poor Mary the widow,Who lived in a cottage the meadow beside.Play not, my dear boys, near the pond in the meadow,The mermaid is waiting to pull you beneath;Climb not for a bird’s nest, the bough it may sliver,And the mermaid will drag you to darkness and death. "
5 " Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around. "
― , Maelstrom (Rifters, #2)
6 " All through the winter months, Rose kept up the practice of sitting by the fire with Peter and a book telling him stories. The doctor stopped to listen one afternoon out of curiosity, and heard her say, “…then the Mermaid said to the Pirate, ‘I would rather perish with the boy than go with you.’ And the Pirate said, ‘So be it,’ and sealed them both up inside the treasure chest. Then the pirate’s crew got together to lift the chest up, and with a nod from their captain, they cast the chest overboard into the sea. The chest was so heavy, it sank in the water in spite of the air inside, and in seconds it was gone from view, disappearing into the deep blue depths. If the boy and the mermaid were unable to free themselves, they would surely perish.” Peter’s eyes were wide with interest. “But- I can’t tell you what happened- you’ll have to find out next time.” She stopped and closed the book. Peter shook his head and put his hand on the book. She laughed and said, “You want to hear more now, do you? "
― Christopher Daniel Mechling , Peter: The Untold True Story
7 " When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again. "
― Russell Hoban , Turtle Diary
8 " there are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea. "
― Carolyn Turgeon , Mermaid
