Prospero's Children Quotes

“When ambition outstrips ability, that is always a recipe for disaster.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“You’d have to trust in Hope,” said Fern. “Is that it?”
No,” Ragginbone replied shortly. “Hope needs something tangible to sustain it. You would have to rely on Faith. Only Faith can endure in the teeth of the evidence.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“There was a long pause. “you know,” he went on, “I sometimes think mankind is dangerously arrogant. We do a few sums, and then claim we have the universe off pat. we measure the spaces between the stars, and declare them empty. We set a limit on infinity. We are like the occupants of a closed room; having worked out everything within the range of our knowledge, we announce that the room and its contents are all that exists. Nothing beyond. Nothing unseen or unknown, incalculable or neffable. This is it. And then every so often God lifts the veil—twitches the curtain—and gives us a glimpse, just a glimpse, of something more. As if He wishes to show us how narrow is our vision, how meaningless the boundaries we have set for ourselves. I felt that when Fern was talking. Just for a minute I though: This is truth, there’s a world beyond all the jargon of unbelief.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“I knew you would come,” he said, “in the end. I have been waiting a long, long time.”
Time seemed to change as he spoke its name, bending out of shape, out of rhythm, curving round to encapsulate them in their own miniature cosmos. The past was coiled around the future: the present was an isolated moment, belonging nowhere, trapped at random in a maze of inverse reflections.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“Worst of all, she realized, Zohrane was without fear, and fear is the braking system of intelligence.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“You should never trust anyone completely,” said Ragginbone, smiling a half-smile which snaked up one side of his face. “Unpredictability is a vital aspect of intelligence.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“As the chant grew in volume she began to be conscious of the terrible potency of language, the sense that a name spoken is a summons and more than a summons, an act of creation, for a word shapes an idea, an idea shapes belief, and belief shapes the world. ”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“They walked along in silence, that silence just before parting where everything has been left unsaid and it is too late now to say it. Fern felt as if her stomach was full of words, words burning to be spoken, but her lips refused to unclose and the words remained inside her, seething, like a bad case of indigestion. ”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“I am his lover. They had made no promises, no vows; this was an interlude which might end with the next sunset or ebb with the changing tide. Yet she knew, with a certainty that belongs only to the young, that this was for always. Whether she had a year, or a week, or just a few hours, she would make it last forever.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“All things resist destruction, according to their capacity. Rocks, pebbles, diamonds. Unity is instinctive to being.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“I am only mortal, desperate, urgent. Spirits have endless ages in which to do nothing, if they so choose, but humans have death to hurry them on. Near or far, the end is always in sight. We have no time to stand and stare. Make your choice, Fernanda.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“The capacity for affection is the best part of humankind.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“And magic exists to break the rules.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“They slept little that night, making their newfound love like people for whom the world is running out. Fern did not think of her Task, not because she had abandoned it, but because she felt it would present itself for her attention when the moment was right, and until then she had an intermission, a suspension of hostilities, given by whatever gods there were. They lay in the cave while outside the tide rose and fell, and she thought that in this life and maybe in all lives she would remember that love sounded like the sea, and the beat of her heart was waves on a beach, and she would hear its echo in the nucleus of every shell.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“Lougarry was waiting over the brow of the hill, lying so still in the grass that a butterfly had perched within an inch of her nose. The stems bent and shimmered as she rose to her feet, and the butterfly floated away like a wind-borne petal. Fern wondered if , like Ragginbone, the she-wolf possessed the faculty of making herself at one with her surroundings, not invisible but transmuted, so close to nature that she could blend with it at will and be absorbed into its many forms, becoming grass blade and wildflower, still earth and moving air, resuming her true self at the prompting of a thought. It came to Fern that we are all part of one vast pattern of Being, the real world and the shadow-world, sunlight and werelight, Man and spirit, and to understand and accept that was the first step toward the abnegation of ego, the affirmation of the soul. To comprehend the wind, not as a movement of molecules but as the pulse of the air, the pulse of her pulse, was to become the wind, to blow with it through the dancing grasses to the edge of the sky...”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“Time is there for a purpose, to keep things in order. Once you change chronology you change history. The past could eat up the present . . .”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children

“Of course, it is only a legend. Still, most legends germinate from a seed of truth and feed on the imagination of Man. We need our demons: they are symbols, overblown maybe, often exaggerated, but effective. They offer simple confrontations between Good and Evil. War, famine, and pestilence are much less straightforward.”
― Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children