Renée

“Byrn speaks and I understand him without effort, his words as clear as spring water. / Ask a favour of the plover, he says. Borrow her eyes. / Then I am flying through the air, and the flying is his song, and I am / the flying, and his words are golden ribbons scrolling about me, bearing / me along. I see the plover's wing and I am the plover. Suspended. / Above the moor. There is no longer any I, only All. / Simple. Vast. Unknown. / All to be forgot on waking, like dew on a spiderweb.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fayne

“All this unfolded in what I now know to call our last weeks. Within the action of this story, these memories mean little. After the first time Graham and I went to bed together, they are symbolically all of a piece. I could have written to you without including them; after all, the things that happen between lovers are lost to the work of history anyway. But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness to it. He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does. If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time