Quotes

Below is a fairly random collection of quotes I want to keep handy and also to share.

“Bogs stir fear. They are powerfully different from every other landscape and when we first enter one we experience an inchoate feeling of standing in a weird transition zone that separates the living from the rotting. Black pools of still water in the undulating sphagnum moss can seem to be sinkholes into the underworld.” (Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog & Swamp)

“The revelation was unquestionable, just as in a thousand other instances the epiphany of the god was felt with absolute certainty. You have a sense of contact with him, and are aware of his arrival in a state of mind intermediate between sleep and waking; you try to look up and are afraid to, lest before you see him he shall have vanished; you sharpen your ears and listen, half in dream and half awake; your hair stands up, tears of joy roll down, a proud kind of modesty fills your breast. How can anyone really describe this experience in words? If one belongs to the initiated, he will know about it and recognise it.” (Aelius Aristides, describing the incubation experience at the temple of Asklepios)

“….being in the Tale meant nothing more than being suited to your role in it and good for nothing else, like having a cast in your eye, by which you saw always something elsewhere, but which to everyone else (even most of the time to yourself) seemed only a disfigurement.” (John Crowley, Little, Big)

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these others forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience)

“And, in the mirror, I looked at my first laugh as a madman.” (Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand)

“The Folk do nothing by halves. Each emotion is a draught that we must drain to the bottom, but sometimes I think we love the sour as much as the sweet.” (Holly Black, Valiant)

“Magic is forgetting that something ever was other than as you willed it.” (Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale)

“What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present to the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, ‘If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.’” (Max Beckmann)

“When you look at [a stone, flower, or bird] or hold it and let it be, without imposing a word or mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you…” (Eckhart Tolle)

“….there is presumably no limit to the opportunities that permit entry by the person bearing a soul into the fiery circle of erotic frenzy. It can consummate itself, or reach perfection, at the mere sight of a beloved being, and that may be a being of the opposite sex, but also one of the same sex, or it might be an animal, or a plant. And it can just as well consummate itself at the smell of a scent, the taste of a wine, the hearing of a sound, and the touch of a dripping branch. It can be roused while awake as if in the most stupefying dream. It celebrates its orgies beneath the breeze of spring storms, in the light of a star-studded heaven, in a hailstone shower, on a flaming mountain ridge, in the raging surf….It is an ecstasy both of the ascent and descent; an ecstasy that transfigures dying and death into agonising bliss! The eternal moment of its perfection contains: unfettered frenzy or crystalline transport of delight….It lacks any similarity to a state of need to such a degree that we must label the compulsion in him as a compulsion to overflow, to radiant outpouring, to boundless giving away of himself.” (Ludwig Klages, Of Cosmogonic Eros, 1922)

“Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life. These things are God or forms of God: not fabulous immortal men, but ‘Things which Are’, things utterly non-human and non-moral which bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity.” (Gilbert Murray)

“There was another kind of beauty, however, and everyone on the Myriad knew it. A twisted beauty that turned your stomach even while it turned your head. Frecht was the old word, a harsh word ragged with superstitious awe. It was an ugliness and otherness that could only be holy, a breach of the rules that echoed those that no rules could bind….Frecht transcended beauty and carried you into a realm of awe and terror. It demanded your slavish devotion.” (Frances Hardinge, Deeplight)

“I don’t think I’m like other people. I mean on some deep fundamental level. It’s not just being half a twin and reading a lot and seeing fairies. It’s not just being outside when they’re all inside. I used to be inside. I think there’s a way I stand aside and look backwards at things when they’re happening which isn’t normal. It’s a thing you need to do for doing magic.” (Among Others, Jo Walton)

“SOCRATES: ‘How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?’ THEAETETUS: ‘Indeed, Socrates, I do now know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond; and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing.’ SOCRATES: ‘You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present in our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both….And may not the same be said of madness and the other disorders? The difference is only that the times are not equal.” (Plato, The Theaetetus)

“The truth about the world … is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.” (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)

“The most ubiquitous vehicle of ritual lostness—the most basic embodiment of disorientation—is the labyrinth…A labyrinth operates as a kind of liminality machine, a structure devised to engineer a concentrated experience of disorientation. As we enter the winding stone passages, and turn our focus to the bounded path, we disconnect from external geography, slipping into a kind of spatial hypnosis, where all reference points fall away. In this state, we are primed to undergo a transformation, where we pass between social statuses, phases of life, or psychic states.” (Will Hunt, “Getting Lost Makes the Brain Go Haywire” – The Atlantic)

“When the wild god arrives at the door, you will probably fear him.” (Tom Hirons)

“He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring – a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings – they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.” (Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land)

“I’ve always maintained that reality is for people who can’t face drugs” (Tom Waits)

“Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects – inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity – perhaps rarity most of all – combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way – as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick – to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.” (K.J. Bishop, The Etched City)

“When your Daemon is in charge do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait and obey.” (Rudyard Kipling)

“Every time I see someone who gets all mushy about fairies, I want to remind them, ‘The fairies are not your friends, anymore than the coyotes are your friends.’ You can interact with them, but under other circumstances they would eat you. They are a different life form, and they are not All About Us.” (Chas S. Clifton)

“And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.” (Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea)

“Basically, I have understood that art and magic are precisely the same thing. This is not a way of saying that magic is a lesser thing, that it is ‘only’ art at the end of the day, but instead of saying that art is a far, far greater thing than its currently degraded state as a commodity or as simple time-filling commodity might lead us to suppose. If you happen to live within a worldview that supposes our entire neurological reality to be made up of words, and happen to believe that certain intense forms of language might therefore be capable of altering that neurological reality, then picking up a pen or sitting down at your keyboard feels like a very different proposition.” (Alan Moore)

“I will argue that Witchcraft is quintessentially wild, ambivalent, ambiguous, queer. It is not something that can be socialised, standing as it does in that liminal space between the seen and unseen worlds. Spatially the realm of witchcraft is the hedge, the crossroads, the dreaming point where the world of men and of spirits parlay through the penetrated body of someone who is outside of the normal rules of culture. (Peter Grey, “Rewilding Witchcraft”)

“Hermes has no temple, because he’s in every temple; he has no rites, because he’s in all rites; he has no expertise, because he’s an expert in everything.  Hermes is the go-between that leads us on in anything and everything; he is the road between destinations, but is not the destinations themselves.  He only leads us along the roads, but the road is where we spend most of our lives and times.  The presence of Hermes is required by man to work with any god, and is required to communicate to man from the gods.” (The Digital Ambler)

“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.” (Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett)

“You make us want what we can’t have and what you give us is worth nothing and what you take is everything and all there is left for us is the cold hillside, and emptiness, and the laughter of the elves.” (Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett)

“My dear, labyrinths ensnare and entangle; they draw one inexorably inward – but it would not be much of a labyrinth if you waited in line with a ticket to get in and the door was clearly marked, like some country-harvest hay maze. All underworlds are labyrinths, in the end. Perhaps all the sunlit lands, too. A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.” (The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne Valente)

“Striving for full awareness of your Faerie Co-Walker, is a dangerous path to walk. I’m not talking here about the dainty, gossamer-winged creatures of Victorian fancy. I am talking about the primal, ancient beings that would steal your baby from it’s crib, lure you to your doom in the fog, forests or wetlands, the powerful subterranean-dwellers who live according to their own laws, that can (and will) rip your face off. I jest you not. These beings should be approached with the utmost care, diligence and respect; a healthy dose of fear would not go amiss either. As a misstep could cost you your sanity, or your life….They will demand a lot from you, sometimes more than you are prepared to give (and they will take by force what you do not give willingly), and in return you will see very little at first, maybe ever. Their thoughts on exchange don’t always meet our own, and in their minds they may have already bestowed great bounty upon you just by revealing their presence….Do not be fooled that you ever have the upper hand with these beings, no matter how many times you convene, for they can surely cut you down a peg or two. And cut you down they will.” (Sarah-Jayne Farrer, In the Chimehours)

“They live near crossroads, or at bridges, where things have a choice to them, and where the veil between what is and what is not grows worn and threadbare, rending easily.” (Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire)

“Yet the gods are not linear.  Do we negotiate with the gods, pray to the gods, in our limited perspective while the gods themselves laugh and say, ‘Yes, my love. You can have this now, because I know you will earn it later…’” (Ariadne in Exile)

“The thing about witchcraft, is that it’s not like school at all. FIRST you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin’ out how you passed it.” (Terry Pratchett, Wee Free Men)

“Sometimes you have to pull back a piece of reality when it gets in the way.” (Boys in the Trees)

“You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone in an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.” (Among Others, Jo Walton)

“Initiation is not a ritual. It is a process. it begins long before any ritual that might mark its passing. The ritual is the least part of any initiatory cycle. One can have a very powerful initiation without there being any type of ritual and likewise one may undergo all the rituals in the world without ever achieving an initiatory state.” (Galina Krasskova)

“If one day I see a small bird and recognize it, a thin thread will form between me and that bird. If I just see it but don’t really recognize it, there is no thin thread. If I go out tomorrow and see and really recognize that same individual small bird again, the thread will thicken and strengthen just a little. Every time I see and recognize that bird, the thread strengthens. Eventually it will grow into a string, then a cord, and finally a rope. This is what it means to be a Bushman. We make ropes with all aspects of the creation in this way.” (unnamed San Bushman, as quoted in What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young)

“The tendency to imagine drugs at the centre of a variety of ancient religions says rather more about us, and our inability to countenance religious ecstasy without the use of psychoactives, than it does about the religions concerned.” (Andy Letcher, Shroom)

“Each prayer has its own proper meaning, and it is therefore a specific key to a door in the divine, but a broken heart is an axe which opens all the gates.” (Rabbi Israel Shem-Tov)

“But God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn’t come through.” (Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God)

“A Sibyl is a door shaped like a girl.” (Catherynne Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There)

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.” (Chuck Palahniuk, Choke)

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open….No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” (Martha Graham)

“Why is it that fresh new ideas invariably seem so familiar? Why do we recognize them by their beauty? Why do the people most blessed with creativity tend so oddly often to go mad? Because the moments when the channel opens are not easy to bear.” (Tex and Molly in the Afterlife by Richard Grant)

“The task of spirituality is to construct and maintain a doorway between the realm harbinged by dreams, and this surface-world. It is an enormously difficult task, because this surface-world has a tendency to reify itself, to declare the film that forms upon its surface as the only reality, and a narrow materialism or empiricism, which only affirms that reality which appears to the senses, rather than to the intuition and dreams, dangerously denies any depth at all to experience and the world….[T]he surface-world does everything in its power to keep the door shut. You can paint the door, you can sprinkle holy water on the door, you can bow down and worship the door, but the last thing the reified social-surface-world wants you to do is to actually open the door and peek through.” (Siegfried Goodfellow)

“‘I’m burning up! I don’t have the capacity for this suffering.’
The Presence says, ‘I keep you for the sake of just this.’
He says, ‘O Lord, but I’m burning up! What do You want from this servant?’
He says, ‘Exactly this—that you burn.'”
(Malaqat, Shams-i-Tabrizi)

“At times, the puppet shares with the mask a power to give form to gods and demons, to the spirits of the dead….In such cases the manipulator, even the puppet itself, can take on the guise of a priest or shaman.” (Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life)

“Puppet theatre is a highly refined art, but depends on something like a child’s, a clown’s, or a mad person’s relation to objects…They are dead things that belong to a different kind of life.” (Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life)

“The mask is constantly changing. Behind the mask is nothing. You are headless.” (Sannion)

“Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.” (Milan Kundera)

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” (Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)

“More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens. At its obsessive extreme such attention is the beginning of paranoia (all coincidence makes ‘too much sense’), but in a more capacious mind it is a kind of happy genius, ready to make music out of other people’s noise.” (Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World)

“Again and again the shaman has to free himself from a deep depression by a creative act. By action he has to bind the disintegrating elements of his psyche into a unity by means of a synthesis, a mysterious psychic activity.” (Andreas Lommel, Shamanism, The Beginnings of Art)

“By communicating (through their propitiations and their chants, through their dances and ecstatic trances) with plants, with other animals, and with the visible and invisible elements, the medicine persons’ craft ensured that the boundary between the human and more-than-human worlds stayed, itself, permeable – that that boundary never hardened into a barrier, but remained a porous membrane across which nourishment flowed steadily in both directions.” (David Abram, Becoming Animal)

“The observation by indigenous peoples that there exist particular individuals – among other animals as among our own two-legged kind – who are in a strangely different league from their peers has led some native traditions to posit that there exists an entirely different species to which such individuals belong, a class of entities who are able to cross between diverse species, taking on the ways of various animals as needed – able to trade wings for antlers, or to forsake paws for scaly fins or even fingered hands. This is the class of those who are recognized, when they’re in human form, as shamans – as magicians or sorcerers. But most contemporary persons, lacking regular contact with the wild in its multiform weirdness, have forgotten that such shamans are to be found in every species, that in truth they are a kind of cross- or trans-species creature, and hence a species unto themselves.” (David Abram, Becoming Animal)

“You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.” (Crow elder, as reported by poet Gary Snyder, quoted from Nature and the English Diaspora by Thomas R. Dunlap)

“When the Universe seems to confirm our fictions as opposed to our supposed theories, then this suggests a strange relationship between fiction, mind, perception, and cosmos that is far more gripping than simply solving a whodunit.” (Alan Moore)

“If what we do cannot be properly considered as science or religion, would it be provocative to tender the suggestion that we think of magic as an art? Or even The Art, if you like? It’s not as if the notion were entirely without precedent. It might even be seen as a return to our shamanic origins, when magic was expressed in masques and mimes and marks on walls, the pictograms that gave us written language so that language could in turn allow us consciousness.” (Alan Moore, Fossil Angels)

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.” (Neil Gaiman)

“However, this has always been the real schism in any religion or spiritual community….not between those who believe and those who don’t, or between two different sets of beliefs, but between those who follow what’s written down or taught because they have no other experience, and those who the Gods and spirits bother and pester, and who take their beliefs from that. Mystics have always been the real troublemakers, even more so than infidels.” (Raven Kaldera)

“Divination is a means of discovering information which cannot be obtained by ordinary means or in an ordinary state of mind.” (Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman)

“What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.” (Robin McKinley)

“Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.” (Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi)

“For those who have shifted into the Otherworld, the transition back becomes hard, if not impossible, after a certain point; a number of folktales throughout Scandinavia mention that those who have wholly gone into the Otherworld for a time and been returned are never entirely happy with life in the Middle-Garth.” (Kvedulf Gundarsson, Elves, Wights and Trolls)

“The Nightmage was the first of them for Anna,” he continued, “and he gave her the Sight to see the rest. Under his influence, Anna began to paint the paintings in this house. It is the best work she’s ever done; true work……But what she didn’t understand is that they have artists among them too. They call them mages. And for some of them, we are the materials they use. Our lives are their raw canvas; our emotions are the paints. We’re the clay: they push a little here, they prod a little there, till the work is done. If they drive a man or woman insane in the process, it matters little to them. They are amoral beings, Anna told me. They are neither good nor bad; those concepts mean nothing at all to them. The Nightmage was an artist, like Anna. And she was the work that he was creating. When she was strong in herself and in her art, the work they created of each other was good. But later, when Anna was frightened, and a bit unstable… then it all went wrong.” (Terry Windling, The Wood Wife)

“No man wishes to be weak. Yet my weakness is also my gift. What is commonplace in one world may be a source of terror in the other. A closed door, the baying of a hound. And yet, what is a mystery in this place becomes clear and simple in that other. It is image and reflection, reality and vision, world and Otherworld.” (Son of the Shadows, Juliet Marillier)

“The world is absurd. Ugly absurd. To repair ugly absurdity, you can’t just be normal. You need an alternative absurdity. A beautiful absurdity. We call it ‘divine madness.'” (Tzvi Freeman)

“The land remembers. Men dance and chant, they fight with sticks, and one rides among them on a hobbyhorse, striking them with a bladder filled with pebbles…. we don’t forget, we just forget why. There is no magic left in the festive practices of Oxford, or Grimley, or wherever – the Morrismen and Mummers – no magic unless the mind that enacts the festival has a gate opened to the first forest.” (Lavondyss, Robert Holdstock)

“Knowledge that lies outside the range of understanding can only be gained in a state that also lies outside this range.” (Philipp Vandenberg, The Mystery of the Oracles)

“A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make the perception possible.” (Peter Brook, quoted in Susceptible to the Sacred by Bani Shorter)

“The only difference between a seiðman and an ordinary man is that the seiðman operates in a world with all the doors and windows open, and the ordinary man doesn’t know that the windows and doors even exist.” (Bil Linzie)

“If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let god consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.” (Donna Tartt, The Secret History)

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.  Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)