The Western Wind Quotes

“Why can't time go backwards as well as forward? If time's not a river but a circle, and if you can travel round a circle one way or another and end up where you started, why can't it go this way and that?”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“if nature thwarts you more than once in the same endeavour, you may have to start wondering if it’s something other than bad luck”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Only somebody with a mind like a rock could go on with the idea that we on our little island are separate from those other places — that great world is rainbow threads woven into our greys and greens. Where did this leather belt come from? he asked me, of a belt I couldn’t see. Not English goats, but Norwegian ones. And the flour for baking bread that feeds our great cities? From Baltic grain, high up in the north. And the ironwork on our new weathervane? Spanish iron. Our little land is flecked with foreignness, the Lord wants our colourful commingling.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she'd strayed from the point.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“A man cannot do something that’s completely outside his own nature any more than a horse can fly.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“You’re the parish priest – your word weighs a hundred times a normal man’s, two hundred times a woman’s, three hundred times a child’s. Your word is a silver weight in the palm. Your word is worth trading money for. It would cut like a stone through water.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“That’s just where you’re wrong, John, because I can put my case to God and he can forgive me or not, and he can punish me or not. I’m not sure he needs you to arbitrate.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Our Lord, the great sweeper and clearer, swerves his broom around these impurities and is careful to leave some dust. After all, if he left the earth always clean and perfect for us, what responsibility would we have for our own lives? Wouldn’t we become lethargic and overly dependent on his goodwill, like lazy children on their parents? So he sweeps, but not in every corner. These impurities left out from heaven or hell are no longer of his creation but instead become unearthly spiritual vapour, enemy of our earthly flesh. ‘This”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Was she thinking, The angels are above me, I must not look up? Perhaps she, tied to the earth by filth and horse flank and low hope, didn’t wish to hear that her priest was similiarly tied, didn’t want to be cured of her envy of him, didn’t even care if he did dire things – only wanted his holy neck to be safe so that it could be capable one day of saving hers.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Laziness is a man wasting time, greed is him wasting food or money, anger is him wasting his peace. But envy – envy is him wasting his fellow man. Wasting the solace of other men.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Envy is the saddest of sins,’ I said, ‘the one God would most like men to conquer.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“My pity was almost with him, desperate foolish man, building and rebuilding accusations from the same bent truths, just as the stoopers were trying to build furrows out of sludge.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Envy the man who’s fat in autumn, and distrust the one who’s fat in spring, so they say.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“tell them: No, no, those aren’t the things to fear, we’ve come too far for superstition. We know there are no wolf-men and no sea creatures of that kind; it’s children who believe in those. There are only spirits – ill-meaning spirits, who live as we all do on God’s earth but aren’t made by God.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Laziness is a man wasting time, greed is him wasting food or money, anger is him wasting his peace. But envy - envy is him wasting his fellow man. Wasting the solace of other men.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“Places you know can seem like foreign lands when your mind's lost itself to the dark.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind

“But it’s our nature to deny what frightens us, and it’s not wicked or dull. Isn’t there always a bright, willing part of us that keeps hoping that what we know isn’t true?”
― Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind