the mirrors QUOTES

4 " You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods-- all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening... "

6 " She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.

Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endorsement. "

― Charles Frazier , Cold Mountain

8 " But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union. "

― Ken Liu , The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

10 " But that’s what family is, isn't it? It’s traditions and trinkets that only matter when we hold them up against the mirrors of our lives, lending them meaning, lending them weight, until they become heavy enough to endure without us. We create the past in the things that we choose to remember about it. We turn everything into stories, and those stories matter because we say that they do. It’s all a wheel, and ours are the hands that turn it. "

― Seanan McGuire , Midway Relics and Dying Breeds

12 " In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless. "

― Roger Zelazny , The Guns of Avalon (The Chronicles of Amber #2)

14 " You must not let me out,' it warned him gently, as it saw his eyes rest on the lock.
'If you release me now that I know my nature, I could not help but unmake the enchantment of the mirrors. You see, they are tame now and they show only what people want and need to see in them. The wildness of them is bound up in my form, though I did not know it for a long time. If I were uncaged, I could not help but tear at the enchantment until I was unnamed. Then I would fly into all of the mirrors and windows and into shining footpaths after rain. The mirrors would become wild and they would be absolutely, utterly truthful. Everything would be seen for what it truly was. My laughter would greet every lie and every pretense. It would rumble like a volcano under the smooth surface of everything. You can imagine the chaos it would cause here, for those who dwell in the greylands do so because the mirrors are tamed. If I were free, people would come to be afraid of them. They would cease to believe in their reflections and eventually they would no longer believe in themselves. No, laughter must remain caged here. "

― Isobelle Carmody , Greylands

16 " But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears? "

― Wally Lamb , I Know This Much Is True

18 " Running away?" He taunted, as I drew my glamour to me, feeling it surge beneath my skin. " Always a coward, weren't you, prince? Never had the guts to really go for the kill." " You're right," I murmured, startling him. He frowned in wary surprise, and I smiled. " I always regretted my words against Puck. There was always a part of me that didn't want to go through with it." I lowered my blade, touching the tip to the floor. Ice spread from the point of the weapon, coating the ground and the walls, freezing the mirrors with sharp crinkling sounds." But with you," I continued, narrowing my eyes, " it's different. You're the part of him that I hate. The part that revels in the chaos you cause, the lives you destroy. And I can say this with complete certainty - killing you will be a pleasure. "

20 " Just as a woman's eyes are the mirrors of her soul, her shapely bottom is her seat of learning. "

― Michael