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“I don’t fear them. I am not such a fool as to fear that they have powers. It’s not that. It’s that they know that I have powers. That’s what makes them such a danger. They are mad with fear of me. They fear me so much that they will destroy me the moment I fall into their hands. I am their terror. I am their fear that walks by night.”
“She is a being not of this world,” my great-aunt says quietly. “She tried to live like an ordinary woman, but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in the common ways, but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man’s world, Jacquetta, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man’s drum.
a man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.
“Take care with your words, Jacquetta, especially in cursing. Only say the things you mean, make sure you lay your curse on the right man. For be very sure that when you put such words out in the world they can overshoot—like an arrow, a curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly.”
“Men command the world that they know,” she says. “Everything that men know, they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who look for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover, they hug to themselves; they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What
Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her.
what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.
The Moors are the source of great knowledge, of all mathematics, all science. I buy the scrolls, and I have them translated myself. This is how I have put us ahead in the search for knowledge. Because I have tapped the source.”
I have no certainty; all that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.” She smiles. “That is the very path of learning,”
“May the Lord who gave you the gift give you the courage to bear it.”
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision, and they cannot tolerate any other.
We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference.
her fire and passion will be softened by his sweetness; he will learn determination and courage from her.
the way to win a man’s heart was to treat him fairly and make him safe.
To let yourself know that you want something, that you yearn for it. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do. Because you have to have courage to know what you desire. You have to have courage to acknowledge that you are unhappy without it. And sometimes you have to find courage to know that it was your folly or your wrongdoing which lost it; before you make a spell to bring it back, you have to change yourself. That’s one of the deepest transformations that can be.”
Magic is the act of making a wish come about. Like praying, like plotting, like herbs, like exerting your will on the world, making something happen.”
