Roz Kaveney > Quotes

“Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world's pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages its landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people; it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking if you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist - the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life.”
― Roz Kaveney

“His mother was, as they say, of good family, but the father who died before he knew him was a tradesman. And his mother's Catholic family had a trade too, to which he did not feel even the slightest bit drawn, and that trade was martyrdom. Thomas More, beheaded for refusing to condone Henry VIII's schism, was his great-grand-uncle; an uncle was imprisoned and exiled for being a Jesuit; his brother died in jail of plague for harbouring a priest.”
― Roz Kaveney, John Donne: How to Believe

“What then, is dark fantasy? I would argue that it is a genre of fantasy whose protagonists inhabit the world of consensual mundane reality and learn otherwise, not by walking through a portal into some other world, or by being devoured or destroyed irrevocably, but by learning to live with new knowledge and sometimes with new flesh.”
― Roz Kaveney, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

“When it was originally suggested to him that he could retrieve his lost career by taking holy orders, it is typical of him that he dithered, felt unworthy, was concerned that he might be entering the priesthood for the wrong careerist reasons. Yet for years, faith had been the scab at which he constantly picked – one of the reasons why Donne feels like one of us, even those of us who have no faith, nor want it, is that these are serious matters for him. The search takes time - "On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go.”
― Roz Kaveney, John Donne: How to Believe

“He was a clever man, who fell, in the end, for a clever woman, it seems; one of the few things we know about the very young woman for whom he wrecked his career – they married secretly and against her family's wishes – is that she was lonely and bookish as a child. As an adult, burdened with constant childbirth, Anne Donne seems to have been the audience for some of the greatest poems we have that combine spiritual love and earthly passion – perhaps it's a sentimentality to think this mattered to her. And of course, in the end, their love killed her in childbirth.”
― Roz Kaveney, John Donne: How to Believe

“The way he examines his conscience for bad faith is very much of his time, and yet also very modern, almost postmodern.”
― Roz Kaveney, John Donne: How to Believe