The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

The worlds still touch, still lie upon one another, close as lovers; but they are drifting apart, and if they are not stopped, one day there will be two worlds, and none can come and go between the two—”

But that had been no dream—dreams were confused, bizarre, a world where all is foolishness and illusion. She knew that somehow she had wandered into the Land of Truth, where the soul goes when the body is elsewhere, and somehow she had brought back not a dream but a memory.

I know very little about your kind of woman. You are my love, my wife, my queen. I swear to you by my crown and by my manhood, you shall be my queen and I will never take another woman before you, or put you aside.

“You are my love and my lord and my king, and I will love you as long as I live, and as long thereafter as God wills.”

Morgause said, “I would rather dwell in a hermitage in the forest than in a house full of chattering ladies! If God is there, it must be hard for him to get a word in edgewise!”

“I am so weary of that old jest! I am no village wise-woman, to meddle with birth charms and love potions and foretellings and spells. I am a priestess, not a witch!”

Perhaps, and I think this more as I grow older, what we speak of as time passing happens only because we have made it a habit, in our very blood and bones, to count things—the fingers of a newborn child, the rising and returning of the sun, we think so often of how many days must pass or how many seasons before our corn will ripen or our child grow in the womb and come to birth

Next page..or some longed-for meeting take place; and we watch these by the turning of the year and the sun, as the first of the priestly secrets.

“I have always wanted my Companions to be men dedicated to the right,” said Arthur. “I do not demand that they be godly men, Galahad, but I have hoped they would be good men.”

“Chattering fools—listen to them! Have they nothing better to do than gossip?” “Probably not,” said Morgause. “Their most Christian husbands and fathers make sure they shall have nothing else to occupy their minds.”

There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever; even in dreams, I never saw again his face, and though I longed for it, I came at last to see that it was just as well, lest I live all the rest of my life in dreams . .

“Sometimes I believe, Lancelet, that it does not matter what we do. The Gods move us as they will, whatever it is that we think that we are doing. We are no more than their pawns.” “If I believed that,” said Lancelet, “I should go mad once and for all.”

“And if I did not believe it, I should perhaps go mad. I must believe that I had no power to do other than I have done.” . . . must believe that I never had a choice . . . a choice to refuse the king-making, a choice to destroy Mordred unborn, a choice to refuse when Arthur gave me to Uriens, a choice to hold back my hand from the death of Avalloch, a choice to keep Accolon at my side . . . a choice to spare Kevin Harper a traitor’s death, and Nimue . . .

“And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his ch...