Carys Davies > Quotes

“I have the cliffs and the skerries and the birds. I have the white bill and the round bill and the peaked hill. I have the clear spring water and the rich good pasture that covers the tilted top of the island like a blanket. I have the old black cow and the sweet grass that grows between the rocks, I have my great chair and my sturdy house. I have my spinning wheel and I have the teapot and I have Pegi, and now, amazingly, I have John Ferguson too.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“He found himself wishing he could go back and start again and do everything differently. But time was the worst thing; time, it seemed to him now, was the only thing you couldn't change; whatever you did, it kept coming.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“He began to feel that he might have broken his life on this journey, that he should have stayed at home with the small and the familiar instead of being out here with the large and the unknown.”
― Carys Davies, West

“You never knew in advance if a decision was the right one. All you could do was try to imagine the future and use that to help you make up your mind in a difficult situation, and if you couldn’t imagine the future, well, you had to make up your mind anyway.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“That was how he felt: that some of the threads of himself were connected but most of them weren’t, and that he was continually on the point of joining them all together without ever managing it.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“How is it, she thought, we never see the big things coming?”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“Sometimes, to encourage himself, he laid his mouth against its soft, leaflike ears and whispered, “Remember, there are no gods. We have ourselves and nothing else.” As he headed”
― Carys Davies, West

“But time was the worst thing; time, it seemed to him now, was the only thing you couldn’t change; whatever you did, it kept coming.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Zoroastrian, they were all the same as far as she could see. They all thought they were the best, and that God loved their lot more than any other lot. When she was making her slow, laborious way through Mr. Byrd's stories and their lessons, it often struck her how much the tales of frogs and princesses, of dark woods and talking mirrors, of spells and wishes and considerable suffering and occasional joy and people doing all kinds of ugly things to each other resembled the ones in the Bible.”
― Carys Davies, The Mission House

“Everywhere is peaceful until it isn't, Daddy," said Ada. "Just because you don't notice the cracks it doesn't mean they aren't there.”
― Carys Davies, The Mission House

“What seems likely is that, in his opinion, one Presbyterian minister was much the same as another—none of them, in his experience, having kicked up any sort of fuss about the removal of people from estates like his own in order for them to be replaced by sheep. Whether they'd stayed with the established Church or come out with the new one, it made no difference; they had not interfered.

Indeed, the Presbyterian doctrine of providence had proved something of a boon in clearing the people—reminding them, as it did, that the events of their lives were no more than the unfolding of God's will; that any suffering accruing from their removal was no more than divine punishment for their sins.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“Old Woman From A Distance still wasn't sure what to think.
One thing he was sure of though: there was no Great Spirit. No Big Man in the Sky looking out for them. If there had been once, there wasn't anymore.
...Sometimes, to encourage himself, he laid his mouth against its soft, leaflike ears and whispered, "Remember, there are no gods. We have ourselves and nothing else.”
― Carys Davies, West

“He's been surprised many times in the course of his career to discover what sort of improbable things people are capable of, and if there's anything he knows for certain, it's that people are endlessly mysterious and unpredictable. They tell the truth and they lie; they are direct and they are devious; they are rational and they are irrational.”
― Carys Davies, The Mission House

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― Carys Davies

“He felt like himself, which is to say, he felt nervous and anxious and sometimes afraid, but also excited and elated and intermittently hopeful and optimistic.”
― Carys Davies, The Mission House

“He knew the names of all the disciples, the stories of Cain and Abel and Noah; he knew the names of Noah's sons, the stories of Job, and Lazarus, and Lot’s wife, the flight to Egypt and the man born blind, the parables of the mustard seed and the talents. He knew about the Sea of Glass in the Book of Revelation; He could recite part of the Song of Solomon and the twenty-third Psalm. He would not fail, he was sure. He would make a convincing enough Christian.”
― Carys Davies, The Mission House

“Forgive me,” he whispered, hardly knowing who he was talking to, only knowing that he was guilty.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“Dedem William'ın Mair'le birlikte - yine Southerdown'da - çektirdiği fotoğrafı saklarım hâlâ. Resimde ikisi de dondurma yiyor. Halam pembe büzgülü, eteği fırfırlı bir mayo giymiş; dedemse pantolonunu paçalarını diz altına dek kıvırmış, kafasına da benekli bir mendil bağlamış. Kızının elini tutmuş. Çok mutlu görünüyor. Hayattan yana başka istekleri olan birine benzemiyor.”
― Carys Davies, The Redemption of Galen Pike

“The compass the fur trader had given him he had no use for because he had the music of the river and the bright configuration of the stars, but he carried it in his hand because he liked it for its beauty and the suspicion that it had some secret power of its own the fur trader wasn’t telling him about; that it was alive in some way. He liked the way the tiny needle quivered beneath the clear covering, like his own heart when he was out stalking or waiting with a hook for a fish to bite.”
― Carys Davies, West

“In eight more months, we will have four new mules and it will be summer.”
― Carys Davies, West

“Looking back, there was only one thing that was completely clear to him, and that was that he had loved the time he had spent with John Ferguson.”
― Carys Davies, Clear