Winter Solstice Quotes

“It’s an old impulse. To honor the dark with festivals of light, to battle it with same. Days are getting darker as we hurtle into winter, it comes at us faster every year. I am listening to sycamore leaves rustle down the sidewalk in front of my apartment. It’s somewhere in the forties. The wind is strong. Its voice changes this time of year, as though coming from darker lungs, and the leaves are at their loudest, last rattle before long quiet. In his fevered novel Malicroix, Henri Bosco describes this almost-winter moment of the year, “when the world was poised on a pure ridge,” balanced between two seasons, casting “a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.” The misty mood is behind us. We’re looking now at something dark and wilder.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“Right now, the darkness takes a deep breath in. Hold tight. We're riding the backs of the swans. There's no flying without land, no emptiness without an edge. The boundaries begin to dissolve. And yet:

Here you are.

Here you are, the winter tells us.

An offer and a fact.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“It is the animal in us that knows the dark - this season stirs that animal in us, and stirs the memories, ones that live in all of us, submerged so deep; of the ancient dark, of a time before gods, before form and words and light. Memories of helplessness. Somewhere, deep in, we remember. The animal in us remembers.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“It's dark in there. How deep in the well will you go?”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“We peer into the abyss, tread into the mystery. It’s a temporary death⁠—an end to the limits of the self⁠—and an emergence from it in the form of rebirth, a waking up.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay