123
" For this is the thing the priests do not know, with their One God and One Truth; that there is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive at the Holy Isle of Eternity or among the priests with their bells and their death and their Satan and hell and damnation...but perhaps I am unjust even to them. Even the Lady of the Lake, who hated a priest's robe as she would have hated a poisonous viper, and with good cause too, chid me once for speaking evil of the God.
'For all the Gods are one god,' she said to me then, as she had said many times before, and as I have said to my own novices many times, and as every priestess who comes after me will say again, 'and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and their is only one Initiator. And to every man his own truth, and the God within.'
And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.
But this is my truth, I who am Morgaine tell you these things, Morgaine who was in later days called Morgan le Fay. "
― Marion Zimmer Bradley , The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)
124
" He said, and his voice was strained as if he had had a mortal wound, 'Gwenhwyfar-' He so seldom spoke her formal name, it was always my lady or my queen, or when he spoke to her in play it was always Gwen. When he spoke it now, it seemed to her she had never heard a sweeter sound. 'Gwenhwyfar. Why do you weep?'
Now she must lie, and lie well, because, she could not in honor tell him the truth. She said, 'Because-' and stopped, and then, in a choking voice, she said, 'because I do not know how I shall live if you go away. "
― Marion Zimmer Bradley , The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)
126
" Il mondo della Magia si allontana sempre di più dal mondo dove regna il Cristo. Non ho nulla contro di lui, ma solo contro i suoi preti che negano il potere della Grande Dea oppure l'avvolgono nella veste azzurra della Signora di Nazareth e affermano che era vergine. Ma che cosa ne può sapere una vergine delle sofferenze dell'umanità?
E ora che il mondo è cambiato e Artù, mio fratello e amante, che fu re e che sarà re, giace morto (e la gente comune lo dice addormentato) nell'Isola Sacra di Avalon, la storia dev'essere narrata com'era prima che i preti del Cristo Bianco venissero a costellarla di santi e leggende.
Il mondo è mutato. Un tempo un viaggiatore, se aveva la volontà e conosceva qualche segreto, poteva avventurarsi con la barca nel Mare dell'Estate e giungere non già a Glastonbury dei monaci, ma all'Isola Sacra di Avalon; allora le porte tra i mondi fluttuavano con la nebbia e si aprivano al volere del viaggiatore. Perché questo è il grande segreto, noto a tutti gli uomini colti del nostro tempo: con il nostro pensiero, noi creiamo giorno per giorno il mondo che ci circonda. "
― Marion Zimmer Bradley , The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)
127
" That faith seems too simple to me-the idea that we have only to
believe that Christ died for our sins once and for all. But I know too much of the truth ... of the way life works, with life after life in which we ourselves, and only we, can work out the causes we have set in motion and make amends for the harm we have done. It stands not in the realm of reason that one man, however holy and blessed, could atone for all the sins of all men, done in all lifetimes. What else could explain why some men have all things, and others so little? No, that is a cruel trick of the priests, I think, to coax men into thinking that they have the ear of God and can forgive sins in his name-ah, I wish it were true indeed. "
― Marion Zimmer Bradley , The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)