Alphabet of Thorn Quotes

“That's the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Do you become in visible?'
'No. I'm there, if you know how to look. I stand between the place you look at and the place you see. Behind what you expect to see. If you expect to see me, you do. I listen in places where no one expects me to be.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter's language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born.
Here I am no longer my own secret.
Will you let me stay?”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“What are the thorns really telling her? It's why she won't let us see them, why she clings to them--or they cling to her--as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can't get out and we can't get in to free her.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“...that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Every moment is like a wheel with a hundred spokes in it. We ride always at the hub of the wheel and go forward as it turns. We ignore the array of other moments constantly turning around us. We are surrounded by doorways; we never open them.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“The message, which one fall or another of the coin would eventually give him, was how to get himself out of his chamber and into Nepenthe's, so that he could tell her why he had not come to tell her why he had not come.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Once I used my powers. Now I feel like a dancing instructor, reminding the queen whom she is dancing with at this hour and with which foot she should begin.'
'Be thankful,' Gavin advised with a laugh, 'that so far the music is still being played and everyone is trying to dance in harmony.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Now the wood in early morning was utterly silent. She walked carefully through damp leaves, around tangles of bramble and vine, trying not to disturb the stillness. She could not see the sky, only green and shadow woven thickly above her, yelding not a scrap of blue. She breathed soundlessly. So did the wood around her, she felt; it seemed a live thing, alert and watching her, trees trailing whisps of morning mist, their faces hidden, their thoughts seeping into the air like scent. It was, she thought, like being surrounded by unspoken words.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“His face, at once beautiful and feral, revealed no more than the lion’s face, which says nothing at all as the lion crouches and waits. It speaks only when it springs.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Easier to understand the wind . . . Easier to walk on the surface of the frothing sea, than to remember the hunger to do it. Easier to remember knowledge than ignorance, experience than innocence. Easier to know what you are than remember what you were.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“She [Kane] and Axis performed the ancient ritual of flinging their toys at one another's heads, and in that moment recognized a common destiny. They became inseparable.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“In sixteen years since then, she had changed beyond recognition, and he had not changed by a moment, being the same dispassionate, thin-haired wraith who had picked her up with his bony hands and tucked her into a book bag to add to the acquisitions of the royal library.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“That sleep that has no language, No dream, No time, No end.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“The Shadow of the Emperor
The Hooded One
Who unmasked night
Who laid the stars like paving stones
Who rode the Thunderbolt
Down the star-cobbled path into day
Was Kane,
The Emperor's twin
Silent, as lightning is silent,
Before the thunder speaks.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“I trust the depths don't leak."
"No."
"Then I'll sleep happily buried in stone.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“A tree spoke to me. It looked like a very old man, twisted and slow, with mossy hair down to its ankles and eyes like dead leaves. It did not say much, just my name. I thinnk that's very strange, that a tree I have never met would know my name.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“I only came here because I knew I had hurt you. I wanted you to know that I didn't mean to—I’ve wanted nothing but to come to you for days, explain that maybe I have taken the world too lightly, but never you. For you I work magic. I do things I never knew I could do.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“Just begin at the beginning and proceed whichever way you can into hope.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“He was sitting in moonlight and candlelight, scratching the head of some beast that looked to Vevay a cross between a lion and a bear. It had black pelt, a flat, broad, fanged face, a powerful bulky body. It seemed to be purring. It cast a smoldering red glance at Vevay than closed it eyes again, leading heavy against Felan's knee.
"what on earth is that?" Vavey asked.
"I've no idea," Felon said. "It came out of an old book I was reading once and it never went back in again. It seems harmless and is very obliging: it let the students practice transformation spells on it. It eats strawberries when it can get them.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn

“his unending ambition to find death and conquer it or become it, which, poets said later, became the same thing in the end.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn