Skellig

by David Almond

“Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. Did you know that?”

“They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel,” she said. “They say they’re where your wings will grow again one day.”

“My mother educates me,” she said. “We believe that schools inhibit the natural curiosity, creativity, and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be opened out into the world, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom.”

‘How can a bird that is born for joy/Sit in a cage and sing?’ William Blake.” She pointed up into the tree. “The chicks in the nest won’t need a classroom to make them fly. Will they?”

“That’s all right. Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.”

“I love the night,” said Mina. “Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”

“The kind of thing William Blake saw. He said we were surrounded by angels and spirits. We must just open our eyes a little wider, look a little harder.”

“We can’t know. Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill?

Why did my father die?” She held my hand. “Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”

“We’re still like chicks,” she said. “Happy half the time, half the time dead scared.”

‘Love is the child that breathes our breath/Love is the child that scatters death.’ ”