The Maker of Swans Quotes

“You have never heard music, Eustace, until you have heard him. It is made of starlight and of first kisses. It seems scarcely to belong to our world.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The Maker of Swans

“I am not myself. It was a common enough form of words. It was what people said of themselves at such times as these. Perhaps it was not so much out of the ordinary. But the words were not right, not for this. It was a worse thing than becoming someone else, a more awful thing. There was a lack, when he sought himself, an incompleteness. He reached inward and found absences. He felt it when he tried to right himself, stumbling on a skewed board; the heft gone at his centre. Derelict—that was the word. He was derelict, or would be soon. He would stand day and night in the unseen weather, sheltering nothing living.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The Maker of Swans

“What they desire most, even those who work from the shadows, is memory. If a thing of beauty goes unremembered, it is as if it never existed. If all they have done is forgotten, they may come to feel...that they themselves have been abolished.”
― Paraic O'Donnell, The Maker of Swans