Redder Than Blood Quotes

“All I can offer is this (without a single remembrance or image, or even incoherent wisp of correspondence), even so I knew, in those eradicated moments, and I know still: That there, there outside the gates of any physical state or world we may inhabit, something is—which, being so unlike, so beautiful and radiant and eternal—can never be transported into living life, not even by a word. Brighter than fires, more soft than fur, better than the best—nameless, non-communicable, absolute. And, without a bookmark in our hearts or brains to enable us to find it while here, yet there—there it nevertheless is, and will be ever. There is nothing to fear or to regret. There is no end. Only always a Beginning—that not even the most lucid scripture, or most transcendent art (even that of the Scarlet Lily, Cremisia Ranaldi) can recreate. We touch upon it, yes, I believe we do, in our greatest poets (which is why, if only as a ghost, she could undo the door). In the best of love or joy, that too—but all of this is a shadow. The shadow of the Nothing which is Everything.”
― Tanith Lee, Redder Than Blood

“Cremisia said, “No, Signore. In this we have misunderstood. Nothing is the absence of anything we may understand. It is invisible in this world, has no presence or substance, neither sight nor sound, touch nor taste, not even, usually, any feeling of itself. It is the vast and unknowable sea that rings us round and lies beyond the physical reality of life, and out of which fly amazements and miracles unforetold. It is what awaits us, just as it is the fount from which we sprang. And being Nothing, we cannot here remember it, just as, here, we fear to enter it again. It is Un-ness, it is Death, it is the empty and unknowable ending. And yet, and yet, in fact it is only perceived in this way since we have here no words for it, no channels of our clever physical minds able to capture and convey its being, either to others or ourselves. It is—here—so unlike here, and what we too are when here, that we find no method to visualize or reclaim it. Or—if some great poet or mystic somewhat may, he, being lost for words, can only resort to symbols, architypes most others will dismiss. Only before, or after life, do we know it. When we are one with it, with Nothing, nothing at all, Nihil. Only then.”
― Tanith Lee, Redder Than Blood