Robin Jarvis > Quotes

“I shall not waste any more words on you," she said coldly. "Your mind is too closed to hear them.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“There is no evil in the darkness, it's just an absence of light.”
― Robin Jarvis, Dancing Jax

“The path of life is strewn with many perils and the folly of knowledge is one of the greatest dangers. Wisdom is a treacherous weapon, little master, for it is sundered from compassion. All too often the end of the journey gains more import than it should and the wise become blind to the road and the method of their passing.”
― Robin Jarvis, Thomas

“Have no fear," the voice told her, "for in thee lies the hope of all. Only thou can deliver the land from darkness."
"How can I?" she asked. "I am just one against so many."
The eyes gleamed behind the dappling leaves. "Yet the smallest acorn may become the tallest oak," came the answer.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“[Robert] Newell's recommendation of walking is also interesting:

'The best way undoubtedly of seeing a country is on foot. It is the safest, and most suited to every variety of road; it will often enable you to take a shorter track, and visit scenes (the finest perhaps) not otherwise accessible; it is healthy, and, with a little practice, easy; it is economical: a pedestrian is content with almost any accommodations; he, of all travellers, wants but little, 'Nor wants that little long'. And last, though not least, it is perfectly independent.'

Newell cites independence, as do a number of the 'first generation' of Romantic walkers I have already surveyed; more striking are his commendation of walking as the safest option, which reflects a very altered perception of the security of travel from that which prevailed in the eighteenth century, and his advocacy of the practical and health benefits of pedestrianism, which against suggests its institutionalisation as a form of tourism and its extension to lower reaches of the middle classes.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“Pedestrianism, [William Bingley] claims, is the most 'useful' mode of travel, 'if health and strength are not wanting.'

'To a naturalist, it is evidently so; since, by this means, he is enabled to examine the country as he goes along; and when he sees occasion, he can also strike out of the road, amongst the mountains or morasses, in a manner completely independent of all those obstacles that inevitably attend the bringing of carriages or horses.'

Bingley has a specific reason here for valuing the combination of freedom and intimacy with one's surroundings enjoyed by the pedestrian, but his rationale is generalisable to other travellers.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“The time is come," he spoke quietly. "Now, when lesser folk would wither, thou must be true to the blood of thine ancestors. Much greatness is bred in thee; accept now this terrible mantle and take a step nearer thy destiny.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“Curious how even a little time can alter so much.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“...I shall let [Anne] Wallace put the case herself, at what I think is necessary length:

'As travel in general becomes physically easier, faster, and less expensive, more people want and are able to arrive at more destinations with less unpleasant awareness of their travel process. At the same time the availability of an increasing range of options in conveyance, speed, price, and so forth actually encouraged comparisons of these different modes...and so an increasingly positive awareness of process that even permitted semi-nostalgic glances back at the bad old days...Then, too, although local insularity was more and more threatened...people also quite literally became more accustomed to travel and travellers, less fearful of 'foreign' ways, so that they gradually became able to regard travel as an acceptable recreation. Finally, as speeds increased and costs decreased, it simply ceased to be true that the mass of people were confined to that circle of a day's walk: they could afford both the time and the money to travel by various means and for purely recreational purposes...And as walking became a matter of choice, it became a possible positive choice: since the common person need not necessarily be poor. Thus, as awareness of process became regarded as advantageous, 'economic necessity' became only one possible reading (although still sometimes a correct one) in a field of peripatetic meanings that included 'aesthetic choice'.'

It sounds a persuasive case. It is certainly possible that something like the shift in consciousness that Wallace describes may have taken place by the 'end' (as conventionally conceived) of the Romantic period, and influenced the spread of pedestrianism in the 1820s and 1830s; even more likely that such a shift was instrumental in shaping the attitudes of Victorian writing in the railway age, and helped generate the apostolic fervour with which writers like Leslie Stephen and Robert Louis Stevenson treated the walking tour. But it fails to account for the rise of pedestrianism as I have narrated it.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“We are happy to observe an increasing frequency of these pedestrian tours: to walk, is, beyond all comparison, the most independent and advantageous mode of travelling; Smelfungus and Mundungus may pursue their journey as they please; but it grieves one to see a man of taste at the mercy of a postilion.'

For the 'man of taste' to be actively recommended the pedestrian alternative indeed shows that a decisive reversal of educated attitudes has taken place, and within a relatively narrow span of years.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“It was then that he discovered he had no more tears to cry.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Fatal Strand

“The most harmful lies and the most hurtful, always contain a grain of truth," he said. "But nevertheless, lies they do remain.”
― Robin Jarvis, Whortle's Hope

“Yours is a true heart, Vespertilio. Beware of it, for it is surely too large for thy chest to contain.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“[William] Coxe expresses...both the pedestrian's advantage of complete freedom of movement, and the inspiring effect of the combination of continual change of scene with maximum time for appreciation that characterises the mobile gaze of the pedestrian traveller. If not a peripatetic by profession, Coxe is clearly one by choice.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professional, educated classes, with the texts it generated being consumed and reviewed in the same way as other travel literature: compared, criticised for inaccuracies, assessed for topographical or antiquarian interest, and so on.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.

Eric Leed”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“Raise thy head, Handmaiden of Orion, thou has borne thyself well thus far.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“Tread not into the fearsome night
But pull the covers high,
Step not into the wild dark wood
For the Hobbers are dancing nigh”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“She could weep no tears, for all hers had been spent.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Final Reckoning

“She had delicate features - almost elfin. If you could imagine a fairy mouse that would be Audrey, although she would not have thanked you for remarking upon it.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Dark Portal

“Alone, her soul destroyed and her heart bereft and empty, the Lady Ninnia touched her amulet and closed her eyes. "No," she breathed, "I was wrong. This time, my wisdom has failed me. Our daughter is not ready. To become the Handmaiden of Orion, one must know terrible grief in order to learn compassion." She gazed after her husband and shook her head sorrowfully. "Even the deaths of us, her parents, are not, I fear, enough. May she find what she needs upon that dark and deadly road upon which I have sent her. My poor, poor child - farewell.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“Nine bright stars from out the void
shining up on high
whose banished soul do they call back
and augur in the sky?
Despoiler of the ancient lands,
who baked the deserts dry.
Scarophion, Scarophion - the demon is close by.”
― Robin Jarvis, Thomas

“Lies breed distrust, and distrust brings conflict.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“There are many things in this unhappy world we cannot alter. We must learn to live with our lot and find peace with ourselves.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Final Reckoning

“The time had finally come when she would have to accept the full power of the Starwife. No longer could she be just Ysabelle. Now she had a land to govern and all the daunting responsibilities that that entailed. The liberty she had experienced since the night she had escaped from the Ring of Banbha seemed to vanish. She was left stripped of her freedom, and only long years of a lonely reign stretched out before her.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“Keep trying, especially at first. It can be very discouraging if your submissions keep being rejected by a publisher, but if your work is what people want to read, you should get there eventually!”
― Robin Jarvis

“The moles came bearing their lamps and then the most ancient and magical creature that ever danced beneath the moon was lost in darkness once more.”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne

“I walked slowly on, without envying my companions on horseback: for I could sit down upon an inviting spot, climb to the edge of a precipice, or trace a torrent by its sound. I descended at length into the Rheinthal, or Valley of the Rhine; the mountains of Tyrol, which yielded neither in height or in cragginess to those of Appenzel, rising before me. And here I found a remarkable difference: for although the ascending and descending was a work of some labor; yet the variety of the scenes had given me spirits, and I was not sensible of the least fatigue. But in the plain, notwithstanding the scenery was still beautiful and picturesque, I saw at once the whole way stretching before me, and had no room for fresh expectations: I was not therefore displeased when I arrived at Oberried, after a walk of about twelve miles, my coat flung upon my shoulder like a peripatetic by profession.

-William Coxe”
― Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

“Hesitating at the last instant, she gazed back at Vesper, and tears brimmed in her eyes as she murmured in a meek voice, "Good-bye, my love." Then she returned to the enchanted device and called out, "May this new vessel serve you well!”
― Robin Jarvis, The Oaken Throne