Danielle > Danielle's Quotes

“Yet at the same time I want to untether my heart, toss it up into the sky and let it take wing. There's a wildness here that, if nothing else, holds promise, possibility. Who needs society? What has it ever done for us?”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall

“We put our feet on the hard ground, take in the night air and look around as if this whole place has sprung up for us and us alone. Not just the house, but the ancient trees, the watching insects, the stars and even the moon. But they have all lives without us for lifetimes that make our own look like the blink of an eye.”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall

“I test my smile the way she always does in the mirror, but the result is strained, and instead of looking pretty and lighthearted, I look like a bee just flew up my skirt.”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall

“I’ve nearly forgotten about my sodden shoes and the stinging from my cut. The fresh, resinuous smell of the woods fills me with renewed energy. We’re Lancelot and Guinevere, fleeing through the forest from a jealous King Arthur. Any moment we’ll come upon a white steed and Lancelot will swing me up upon its jeweled saddle and we’ll gallop off together.”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall

“He has the face of a classical statue, all strong angles rendered soft and besutiful as if by a practiced sculptor. His eyes are the misty green of shipwreck glass, and indeed I fear they could lure me to a stormy fate.”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall

“I have no quarrel with the Christ, only with his priests, who call the Great Goddess a demon and deny that she ever held power in this world.”
― Marian Zimmer Bradley

“There was a time when a traveller, if he had the will and knew only a few of the secrets, could send his barge out into the Summer Sea and arrive not at Glastonbury of the monks, but at the Holy Isle of Avalon; for at that time the gates between the worlds drifted within the mists, and were open, one to another, as the traveller thought and willed. For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.”
― Marian Zimmer Bradley

“For this is the thing the priests do not know, with their One God and One Truth: that there is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive in the Holy Isle of Eternity or among the priests with their bells and their death and their Satan and Hell and damnation...”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“these Romans counted their lineage through the male line, rather than sensibly through the mother.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“her mother had borne those children in freedom, as a Tribeswoman should, to such fathers as she chose, not as a slave to some Roman whose customs gave him power over women and children.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“The two are one,' said the Merlin, sitting very erect, 'but the followers of Christ have chosen to say, not that they shall have no other Gods before their God, but that there is no other God save for their God; that he alone made the world, that he rules it alone, that he alone made the stars and the whole of creation.'
Igraine quickly made the holy sign against blasphemy.
'But that cannot be,' she insisted. 'No single God can rule all things … and what of the Goddess? What of the Mother...?'
'They believe,' said Viviane, in her smooth low voice, 'that there is no Goddess; for the principle of woman, so they say, is the principle of all evil; through woman, so they say, Evil entered this world; there is some fantastic Jewish tale about an apple and a snake.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“...'for there have been followers of other Gods in our time. But they respected the Gods of others.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“… 'for as the Druids know, it is the belief of mankind which shapes the world, and all of reality.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Not in my own body. But I have read much in the great hall which is not in this world, there the Record of All Things is written. And also, I was living then. Those who are the Lords of this world permitted me to come back, but in another body of flesh.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“What the Merlin means, little sister, is that he was living when the Christians first came here, and that he chose, and was allowed, to reincarnate at once, to follow his work through.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“The Christians seek to blot out all wisdom save their own; and in that strife they are banishing from this world all forms of mystery save that which will fit into their religious faith. They have pronounced it a heresy that men live more than one life - which every peasant knows to be true.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“What just God would create some men wretched, and others happy and prosperous, if one life were all that they could have?”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“As they deny the world of the spirit, and the realms of Avalon, so those realms cease to exist for them. They still exist, of course; but not in the same world with the world of the followers of Christ. Avalon, the Holy Isle, is now no longer the same island as Glastonbury where we of the Old Faith once allowed the monks to build their chapel and their monastery.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“In our world, Igraine, there is room enough for many Gods and Goddesses. But in the universe of the Christians - how can I say this? - there is no room for our vision or our wisdom. In their world there is one God alone; not only must he conquer over all Gods, he must make it as if there were no other Gods, had never been any Gods but only false idols, the world of their Devil. So that, believing in him, all men may be saved in this one life. This is what they believe. And as men believe, so their world goes. And so the worlds which once were one are drifting apart.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“There are now two Britains, Igraine: their world under their One God and the Christ; and, beside it and behind it, the world where the Great Mother still rules, the world where the Old People have chosen to live and worship.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Our world - ruled by the Goddess and the Horned One, her consort, the world you know, the world of many truths - is being forced away from the mainstream course of time.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“A pathway must remain, even if it is a secret.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“the worlds shall once again come together, a world with room for the Goddess and for the Christ, the cauldron and the cross. And this leader shall make us one.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Listen to me Igraine,' said the Merlin. 'I fathered you, though that gives me no rights; it is the blood of the Lady which confers royalty, and you are of the oldest royal blood, descended from daughter to daughter of the Holy Isle.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“A daughter of the Lady belonged only to the Goddess, and to that man into whose hands the Lady chose to give its care - most often her brother, only very rarely the man who had begotten it.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Do not think that this little one cannot understand. Babes know more than we imagine; they cannot speak their minds, and so we believe they do not think.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“No man or woman can live another's fate.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Igraine said sharply, 'You will not speak so of the God of my husband, who is a God of love.'
'You say so. And yet he has made war upon all other Gods, and slain those who will not worship him,' Viviane said.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“The exquisite paradox of this engagement is that when the suffering is fully allowed, it dissolves.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“No matter how dutiful one tried to feel, it was impossible to be sad at leaving this behind, not when the blood ran hot and rich in the veins, and when out in the world there were all the untried beckoning enchantments : dancing, sensuous music, merriment - and love.”
― Anya Seton, Katherine