Elizabeth Knox Quotes

She said to him, 'You might melt.' And he said, "If I melt, you can make me again.

Do you no longer believe in your luck?'
'You're not my luck, fallen angel, or even my dearest friend. You're my love. My true love.

Every day time stopped and Sobran saw Xas, the sun reflecting off his raised wings, white chest watermarked by tears dried in fine dust; bare skin and colourless nipples, as innocent as a child's; the double signature, seagreen and vermilion, awake and vivid; a whitelipped white face and eyes, abysmal, inimical, like the sea seen through holes in an icefield. It was like being in love, this remembering, because Sobran couldn't put Xas out of his mind. And it was like shame. Because he grew so tired defending himself from the pain of this one recollection, Sobran forgot everything else he knew about the angel.

Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.'
'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?'
'Yes.'
'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?

I don't know whether you know this, but there are people in the world with a very odd gift, one that looks like crossed wires. These people firmly believe that every number has a color, and every sound a shape..." pg 273

He said, 'Don't mind what happened to me. Don't be angry. I'm a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.

It'll turn out you mean love,' Sholto said. 'At the moment math is the only thing that excites you so you're nosing around numbers as if numbers are life. But in two years you'll be telling me about some boy.

Xas was whiteskinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel's neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was worked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a darkhaired girl who has never suckled a child.

Children are uncivilized, so have a staggering power to harm, especially those people whose hearts need mending. In that house an unhappy child was too much rain on a high water table. I poured it on and the terrain liquefied.

So, did you need to hear that? Did you really need to know more?' Xas asked.
'Yes. It's always better to know more.'
'God help you,' Xas said with feeling.

Xas put his face close to Sobran's and said, soft and succinct, "Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: 'Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.' So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.

Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.

I knew I was in danger from the moment I proposed visiting you a second time. I knew because God warned me by sending the whirlwind that pulled a few feathers.'
'But you still came every year.'
'God is my maker but not my master. And I don't think he was saying "Thou shalt not", rather, "I think you're going to regret this.."'
'So, you go freely, with hints. If God made a suggestion to me I'm sure I'd take it. I mean, I assume He has, but I've misunderstood.

Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.

The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam.

Xas reappeared and showed every sign of winding himself around Sobran permanently, like -Sobran complained - some parasitic vine.

The geologist, six years ago now, hadn't defied anything to climb the hill. He'd had his own powerful magic
the ordinary magic that extraordinarily interested people always have.