The Ruin of All Witches Quotes

“The worst of it was that there was no easy way to act against witches, or escape them. It didn't matter how detested Hugh and Mary had become: there they were, following the same routines, persistently present - not predators to be trapped or Indians to be shot at, or even homicidal colonists who could be dragged into court. They were ordinary neighbours, difficult to shun in a social world of mutual dependence.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Dreams extended a real world danger into an imaginary one.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once. And still we do not know how it was.”[11]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“On a wall next to a discount supermarket, a colorful mural asked: “What Makes a Man?” This was also the question asked of Hugh Parsons as he struggled to meet local expectations—a question that, in the end, he failed to answer to anyone’s satisfaction.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Pynchon may have been gullible about witches, but his belief that divinity resided in everyone was truly humanist.[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“In civil discourse, and prominently in the courts, confidence in sensory evidence of the supernatural diminished. William Pynchon was a harbinger of that change.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Puritan leadership in New England collapsed mainly from the franchise shifting from church membership to land ownership. But the civil injustice of Salem eclipsed the menace of religious dissent. The original godly “errand in the wilderness” had been tarnished, the spirit of charity abraded by commercial endeavor. And wherever self-interest took away from altruism, causing resentment, anxiety and a sense of guilt, witchcraft was apt to flourish, to the detriment of decency and order.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“So when Springfield was rebuilt and repopulated, rising like a phoenix from its ashes, there too flourished sin: the pride, greed, self-love ensuing from worldly desire for possessions. “Land hath been the idol of New England,” declaimed a minister. “Christians have forsaken churches and ordinances, all for land.”[101]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“The same spirit infused a new edition of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a treatise by the Elizabethan skeptic Reginald Scot, which argued that confessed witches were in fact harmless melancholics in need of food and medicine.[69]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Norton also observed that by relocating God’s wrath, and so responsibility for the Crucifixion, to the devil, Pynchon credited the devil with more power than any Christian could stomach. To regard Satan or man as anything other than God’s hapless instruments was heretical.[49]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“This was the wretched end of Mary Parsons’s arduous journey from the Welsh Marches to the American wilderness; through two abusive marriages, the loss of two babies and a twisted thicket of delusion, resentment and remorse. At the hour of her death, perhaps she saw heaven, or the figure of Mr. Wroth, the good shepherd of Llanvaches, pointing that way. He had been the one truly decent man in her life, who faced down approaching demons, spread charity to all and rejoiced in the light of Christ’s love.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Hugh explained solemnly that he had been “loath to express any sorrow before his wife, because of the weak condition that she was in.” Struggling to contain himself, he had fled the piteous scene where his child lay dead, returning to the fields to weep alone. In turmoil, his first thought had been that family and neighbors would think him unmanly for crying—not acting like a man should. He had thought his devastation was implicit: it had literally gone without saying.[45]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“To remove oneself from the community was voluntary exile from the binding covenant that kept it together. King James I himself, the author of a treatise on witches fifty years earlier, had alerted his subjects to the witch’s “natural melancholic humor,” signs of which included “desire of solitude.”[18]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Like Baxter, Pynchon saw more love than wrath in God, love that should unite Christians in inclusive congregations. Relying on public confession to sort the drowned from the saved, surmised Baxter, amounted to “taking a very few that can talk more than the rest, and making them the church.”[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Colonists across New England contemplated their own sins and misdemeanors while censuring others, a desire for unity and uniformity mixing with righteous anger, nervous guilt and rank hypocrisy.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“day of penitence and prayer to beg God’s forgiveness. Now six months pregnant, Mary desperately needed to rest. Her husband wanted her to work. He resented what he saw as her idleness, and she felt isolated, oppressed, exiled again—this time from her new life, even from herself.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“There was sickness, and it would last until spring. Such adversity fitted into a cosmic whole, with invisible threads linking households to the heavens.[26]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Melancholy, everyone knew, was the mother of all terrors of the night, and Hugh was the kind of melancholic soul whose humors doctors said were flooded with black bile.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Her deepening misery went beyond what was considered normal among Springfield’s hard-pressed women. It became clear that what she needed was not just the spiritual counsel of Reverend Moxon but a physician.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Relations between Hugh and Mary cooled, like an early winter after a warm, bright summer. Their neighbors, the Lombards, noticed this with quiet dismay. And yet, bad husbands and wives had a purpose: all neighborhoods needed a failing household, which made lackluster marriages look better and provided an object lesson in how not to behave.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Marriages were like flawed bricks that exploded during firing, or which looked sturdy but cracked and crumbled under pressure: often, things like a forthcoming harvest or the arrival of a child in a couple’s lives.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“But mainly the mood that made witchcraft plausible settled in New England because by the mid-1640s its economic and social woes had reached Old World levels.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Fear incubated guilt, which was projected and returned as anger—much as colonists in New England imputed their own aggression to Indians, easing their own consciences and justifying drastic countermeasures. A vengeful God could only be humbly appeased; but a vengeful witch could be righteously repelled, and even, using the law, killed.[79]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Witchcraft was the antithesis of communal charity, and suspicions spread insidiously, like a virus.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“In this climate, the idea festered that adversaries, naturally powerless and forbidden to use violence, might resort to magic to get their own way.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Colonial homesickness was firmly attached to place and only loosely to nation.[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Contrary to English assumption, these Native Americans had long been farmers as well as hunter-gatherers, based in villages on higher ground to the south and west, but more peripatetic than sedentary. They valued seasonal access to natural resources, not exclusive ownership or despoliation, which only confirmed English prejudices about their ignorance and idleness.[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“orderly rows of homes—suggesting a people who commanded nature rather than sympathized with it.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Public confession had a dark, divisive side: it was, after all, the process by which the drowned were separated from the saved.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“But in the late 1630s it was Lewis who departed, leaving Mary alone in the world. They had wasted a childless decade, for which he may have blamed her (even though, considering her later fertility, the problem probably lay with him).[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World