1
" Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle…
What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand. "
― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
4
" You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. "
― Hilary Mantel , Giving Up the Ghost
5
" Out in the shadows of the city, in the houses and cellars, in the secret rooms and locked attics, a stirring cold be sensed. The ghosts and spirits-of-place whispered and muttered on the edge of hearing, glided and flowed on the edge of sight. They were pleased with the turn of events; it was they who had driven the small garrison of Polypontian troops out to die in the snow. It was they who’d haunted their movements through the cities. And it was they who had joined them on watch in the dark of the night, filling their minds with a slow-growing fear, which had evolved into a terror that had driven them mad… The Queen had returned, and some of the people, and the rest of the folk would one day come back and they could slip back into their minds, becoming the warp and the weft of the legend and stories. Becoming the fireside companions of long winter nights, living their lives for a while in the minds of the breathing, in the blood that still flowed, in the feelings that still thrilled to nerves that still sensed. "
― Stuart Hill , The Cry of the Icemark
