The Vintner's Luck Quotes

“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I'd supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.'
'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?'
'Yes.'
'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Why do you come here?"
"I promised."
"I release you from your promise!"
"It wasn't you I promised," the angel said quietly.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Do you no longer believe in your luck?'
'You're not my luck, fallen angel, or even my dearest friend. You're my love. My true love.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“And what of those losses that seem unbearable? Separations from people we feel we can't live without?'
'Perhaps our ruin honours the strength of our love.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I don't know what God intends, or what qualifies Him to forgive me,' Sobran said”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."
Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not."
"I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken."
This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing - a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I had to give myself up to you for your lifetime. What is faith when you feel you've lost something forever? I had to have you--someone I could lose forever.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Every day time stopped and Sobran saw Xas, the sun reflecting off his raised wings, white chest watermarked by tears dried in fine dust; bare skin and colourless nipples, as innocent as a child's; the double signature, seagreen and vermilion, awake and vivid; a whitelipped white face and eyes, abysmal, inimical, like the sea seen through holes in an icefield. It was like being in love, this remembering, because Sobran couldn't put Xas out of his mind. And it was like shame. Because he grew so tired defending himself from the pain of this one recollection, Sobran forgot everything else he knew about the angel.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Xas was whiteskinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel's neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was worked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a darkhaired girl who has never suckled a child.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Xas put his face close to Sobran's and said, soft and succinct, "Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: 'Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.' So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Xas reappeared and showed every sign of winding himself around Sobran permanently, like -Sobran complained - some parasitic vine.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“So, did you need to hear that? Did you really need to know more?' Xas asked.
'Yes. It's always better to know more.'
'God help you,' Xas said with feeling.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Sobran wondered whether the angel was trying to follow his feelings about age or those of humans in general. He felt that he had to get his answer right, so he thought for a time before he told Xas, "It's as if I can no longer fit the space I've made for myself in the world. Yes--I've shrunk inside the space I've made.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I knew I was in danger from the moment I proposed visiting you a second time. I knew because God warned me by sending the whirlwind that pulled a few feathers.'
'But you still came every year.'
'God is my maker but not my master. And I don't think he was saying “Thou shalt not”, rather, “I think you're going to regret this..”'
'So, you go freely, with hints. If God made a suggestion to me I'm sure I'd take it. I mean, I assume He has, but I've misunderstood.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I know that you're a virgin and as bodiless as any paralytic. I know I'm old and not as handsome as I once was. But I know you love me as I love you.'
And he kissed the angel.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity.
Impossible.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“He said, ‘Don’t mind what happened to me. Don’t be angry. I’m a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Lucifer has theories. What God makes are copies and distillations. A soul is a distilled human. Earth and purgatory are distilleries. My Niall”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“But among the poor and weak and old my strength is obscene. How can I live without a commitment to help at least some poor creature? It’s pity someone or pity everyone. And, because it is impossible to act on universal pity, my pity is liable to evaporate. I keep the stopper in. For without pity, and among you, what would I be?”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“He could contemplate, in a sentimental way, the idea of his wife, children and grandchildren arranged, well-dressed and weeping decorously, around his grave. His lovers, she ten years his junior and a handsome woman, and the lovely immortal, he imagined them disentangling their feet from his ribcage and walking on. It”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“it seems impossible to me to describe even a short journey, for every step depends on other earlier steps and my whys and wherefores are as infinitesimal as atoms in the scent trails we leave in the air – negligible, not evidence, but there.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I must somehow settle my debt to the world, which I have loved, disregarding what I have learned of its Master’s fastidious wastefulness.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Not all angels come from Heaven,’ Xas said. Then, ‘I’m a fallen angel.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“He had gone to bed early, made love, then got up and washed – it wouldn’t do to meet an angel while glazed in places with love’s juices, like an egg-white coated Michaelmas bun.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I mean, angels are unresponsive. They mind their business — which is as it should be.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“The angel took a deep breath then huffed out hard through his nose, like an impatient parade horse.
"I returned because it pleased me to promise you, and to keep my promise. I returned to see what happened about your love troubles. That first night, the night we met, I'd only stopped here to rest. The rose bush I carried was heavy. Or, to be exact, its damp roots were. It was of no great height and pruned back to dead wood, little more than a bag of roots in soil. I dropped it when I caught you – when you fainted. And I lost it. But the year it rained and I went down to your house I saw that someone had found and planted it. The pink rose I carried from Denmark and was transporting to my garden.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck