The Ice-Shirt Quotes

“(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“The landscape around us is but a shadow of the landscape within us.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“Looking at her, thinking of her transported him, which struck him as vile because now it was hard for him not to despise the icy serenity of their earlier relations. And he knew that he should not love her, for she had been someone else whom he was supposed to love differently. -What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spider web?”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“But I don't think a river wants anything, except to be itself. Just like anybody and anything. I don't think it claimed a soul. I don't think it's at all vindictive or vicious, just itself. It just seemed very honest. If you hear a river moan, you know it has life.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“In those days there was Power everywhere. You did not have to be wise to find it. Power lived in pretty feathers; Power was in stars and owls beaks; Power was in the patterns that the women painted on everyone's shirts so that they could find the animals they hunted and kill them; they could bring back meat to eat and clothe everyone in their skins and they could all dream of the Star People who dwelled on the black roof above the trees and sparkled at their images in brooks and lakes; they dreamed also of the Plant People who came on green legs bringing corn-gifts and tobacco-gifts; and all the gifts had Power; but the most Powerful color was red, and the women made paint from red earth and bird's eggs and painted special things on everyone's shirts, so the red cloth of the Jenuaq was highly prized.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“I ask again: - Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“. . . for his thoughts were but a succession of stars that wheeled about in his skull-sky like the moon and the sun, chasing each other through all the lovely halls.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“...he sometimes thought that they had achieved a perfect understanding. Gudrid knew this, and took pleasure in it. But she could not let it stand in the way of her plans.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt