A.S. Peterson Quotes

Should we Knights, in years to come, dwindle into memory, perhaps the world will recall that in the days of our demise we stood, hewing at the fetters of captive men.

Though Fin couldn't see it, she felt the closeness of land around her. From beyond the grey veil she could sense the oppressive weight of two great continents crowding down to the sea, each to kneel and contemplate the nearness of an ancient earthen brother.

She chased the song like a hound fast upon a scent. She pursued it through a forest primeval: a dark land planted with musical staves and rests and grown thick with briars of annotation. On she went and on still until she caught sight of the song ahead of her, fleeting and sly. "I see it," she said aloud, though she didn't mean to.

The man held himself still and turned his milk-flooded eyes on her. Fin felt something like vertigo and knew that, though blind, he was seeing. He wasn't looking at her or past her. He was looking into her. And what he saw, he judged.
"Is very good.

(Topper) I'll story 'em, Fin. I'll story 'em clean.

And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle's hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth. Pierre-Jean drew back and stood mesmerized. The room around Fin stirred as every ear bent to the ring of heartsong. It rushed through Fin and spread to the outermost and tiniest capillary reaches of her body. Her flesh sang. The hairs of her arms and neck roused and stood. She sped the bow across the strings. Her fingers danced on the fingerboard quick as fat raindrops. Every man in the room that night would later swear that there was a wind within it. They would tell their children and lovers that a hurricane had filled the room, toppled chairs, driven papers and sheets before it and blew not merely around them but through them, taking fears, grudges, malice, and contempt with it, sending them spiraling out into the night where they vanished among the stars like embers rising from a bonfire.

And though the spirited cry of the fiddle's song blew through others and around the room and everything in it, Fin sat at the heart of it. It poured into her. It found room in the closets and hollow places of her soul to settle and root. It planted seeds: courage, resolve, steadfastness. Fin gulped it in, seized it, held it fast. She needed it, had thirsted for it all her days. She saw the road ahead of her, and though she didn't understand it or comprehend her part in it, she knew that she needed the ancient and reckless power o

She will at least be decently clothed as she waits. Tomorrow I shall find her a brush and powder and whatever else a woman of her dignity requires."

Fin rolled her eyes. "Is 'dignity' what you call it?"

Jeannot offered her his hand. Fin took it and pulled herself up from the deck. She was barefoot and her pants and shirt were stained with everything from blood to oakum to lampblack. She stretched her shirt out between her hands and considered its mottle of stains. "I'm not dignified?" she asked.

When Fin looked up, Jeannot had an eyebrow cocked high and one side of his mouth was curled in amusement. "Where you are concerned, much requires redefinition.

It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind.

Then she took up the bow and began to play. The tone was warm and deep, storied with layers of age.

Her mind circled Georgia, circled Ebenezer. It called up images and memories and things nearly home but never that final destination itself, as if it existed at the center of her mind, shining like a sun too radiant. She knew there was a face at the center of that radiance. A face too bright. A face she sought and longed for but could no longer bear the light of. She drifted into sleep, circling, circling, circling.

Despite an unfriendly demeanor and shrewd tongue, Sister Hilde's nose was her deadliest weapon. Same as the rest of her, it was long, pointed, and gnarled like an old tree, striking out first in one direction, then shifting midstride to head in quite another, then finally changing its mind again and heading back the way it had gone to begin with. When she was irritated, it twitched back and forth and turned red. When she was mad, it dove down and depressed her nostrils, making them flare out like crab apples. Children claimed she could even point with it, and the last thing a child wanted was to look up and find Sister Hilde's nose pointing at him. Wherever Hilde was, somewhere else was always a better place to be.

in all the vastness of the world, the deepest adventure is not of war or mortal danger, but of heart, of soul, of the infinite discovery of a beloved other.

Beautiful, that's what you got to do with that hurtin', you got to turn it beautiful.

…time has a way of leading a person along a crooked path. Sometimes the path is hard to hold to and people fall off along the way. They curse the road for its steep grades and muddy ruts and settle themselves in hinterlands of thorn and sorrow, never knowing or dreaming that the road meant all along to lead them home. Some call that road a tragedy and lose themselves along it. Others, those that see it home, call it an adventure.

Once she started awake to a sound like the low roll of drums, and to the south she saw an endless congregation of antelope that moved across the nighted plain, raising a cloud of dust behind them that swallowed the stars and turned the moon rusty brown as a scrape of ruined iron. Near dawn, in that darkest hour, she raised her head again and saw to the north the passage of sails. They hovered across the deep like a parade of phantom cavaliers tilted upon hellish steeds. They passed in waves, ranks upon ranks of ghostly warlords bent toward the coming dawn as if to impale the sun itself and set it atop a spike in the blackened sky.