Winter Tide Quotes

“Even the most ill-formed words, set to paper, are a great blessing.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“Odd how automatic masks are, even with those who’ve seen beneath them.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“If magic violates the fundamental laws of nature, they clearly weren't all that fundamental.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“It is written in the Archives that, once upon a time, the gods looked out on a universe barren and unthinking save for themselves. And they tested and experimented until they sparked matter into a form that might, one day, be capable of thought. And Shub-Nigaroth, mother of fear, looked on the first life and said: it will fail, but for now it is good. Spector”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“There are different ways of understanding the universe, and you learn nothing by running an experiment if a spell or a sculpture is what’s needed. And there are things we’ll never understand because we don’t have the time, or the right sorts of minds.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“Surely one’s childhood concerns must be hard to encounter decades later, regardless of the life fallen between.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“History was long, and life short,”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“And then—in one of the common five-and-dime notebooks, familiar handwriting indeed. My own, my childhood scrawl. I clasped the book against me, afraid to look, then did so anyway. The first entries were from 1923; I'd been seven. My script was still shaky, wavered above and below lines as it complained of Caleb's infant irritations and exulted over classroom triumphs and favored desserts. My spelling was excellent. I wanted to curl around myself or cry; I did neither, though my whole body felt taut with the distance between myself and myself.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“This is the simplest of spells, and foundation to all others. Magic seeks to better understand, and eventually to build on, the connection between minds and bodies. Even to calm a storm, you treat the wind and rain as if they were alive and corporeal. That is why blood is part of the spell, along with words and symbols.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“Aeonist teachings say that no race is clean of such ignorance or violence. When faced with the threat of such things, we should strive as the gods do to prevent them or put them off. But when faced with such things already past, we should recall the vastness of time, and know that even our worst pains are trivial at such a scale.” His mouth twisted. “Does that help?” I shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes I can’t help seeing our resistance and kindness, even the gods’ own efforts to hold back entropy, as trivial too. No one denies it, but we need the gods, and the kindness, to matter more anyway.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide