Alison MacLeod > Quotes

“The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.”
― Alison MacLeod, Wave Theory of Angels

“He decides it is better to die in Ireland than in Paris because in Ireland the outdoors looks like the outdoors and gravestones are mossy and chipped, and the letters wear down with the wind and the rain so everyone gets forgotten in time, and life flies on.”
― Alison MacLeod, All the Beloved Ghosts

“To imagine wasn’t to escape but to go deeper; to see through to the secret life of the world.”
― Alison MacLeod, Unexploded

“There is no invasion as fearful as love, no havoc like desire. Its fuse trembles in the human heart and runs through to the core of the world. What are our defences to it?”
― Alison MacLeod, Unexploded

“Marvel comes quickly, cloaked in the mundane. It's the woman waking to the smell of smoke as fire spreads, miles away, through her brother's house. It's the sharp flash of recognition as a young man glimpses, in the ordinary hubbub, the stranger with whom he will share his life. It's a mother's dream of her baby, blue in the cold store, six months before he comes, stillborn, into the world.

Even the Church Fathers admitted the category of marvelous- or mirabilis, as they knew it. For them it was an irksome classification. A grey area.

Compare the marvel with it's less troublesome metaphysical kin. In the thirteenth century, the miracle reflected the steady-handed authorship of the divine- truth made manifest. Similarly magic, or magicus, demonstrated with tell-tale showmanship the desperate guile of the devil. The marvel, however, was of poor performance and tended, therefore, towards ambiguity. It took shape in the merely mortal sphere. It seemed to lack the requisite supernatural chutzpah. Here, the clergy were typically surplus to requirements.

Yet, if less outwardly compelling, the marvel was also less easily contained than either the miraculous or the magical. It remained more elusive. More stubborn. And if finally reducible in time, with the erosions of memory, to rationalization, anecdote, drinking tale or woman's lore, the marvel also rarely failed to leave behind a certain residual uncertainty. A discomfiting sense of possibility. Or, on bolder occasions, an appetite for wonder.”
― Alison MacLeod, Wave Theory of Angels

“A good story was a form of communication, mind to mind, spirit to spirit. It sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across space, decades and centuries. Human sympathy -- human attention -- had magic in it. Any real story fizzed with sympathy -- the writer's and reader's -- across time, over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.”
― Alison MacLeod, Tenderness

“Readers are keepers of secrets: as an illicit page is turned, as a dangerous truth is inferred. The pulse quickens. Something explosive ticks between the lines. There is an intake of breath; the voyeur's silent flare of recognition. All the while, his or her face is impassive, unremarkable even, because like all subversives, readers lead careful double lives.”
― Alison MacLeod, Tenderness

“Any good photo is a secret of a secret. It's the unknowable glimpsed within a glimpse, the puzzle in plain sight. It's the question that makes us look for an answer we're never going to find. An open case. An unsolved mystery. A good still is never still - it's restive, alive.”
― Alison MacLeod, Tenderness

“The cameras roll on in black-and-white, and the silvery expanse of the Sound flashes and flickers, as if the scenes, its players - and the year at its close - have been rinsed in a wide, New World light.”
― Alison MacLeod, Tenderness

“High above, the oracle of the moon rose in the watchful night.”
― Alison MacLeod, Tenderness

“Fairies weren’t always pretty mites. That was just tales people told for babies.”
― Alison MacLeod, These Our Monsters: The English Heritage Book of New Folklore, Myth and Legend

“They waited in position, bayonets fixed, on the morning of July 1st, and listened to the mines go, on schedule at 7.25 a.m. In the distant village of Fricourt, the church bell rang clamorously as the tower collapsed.

The weird sound unnerved the men as they waited in their trench, as if the clanging of the bell were the terrible gabble of their own mute fear. Then the whistle went, and they surged forward, over the top into a world of noise.

There was no logic that carried Perceval Lucas forth as he ran on those strong, lean legs of his; no discernible path that had taken him from his garden by the stream at Rackham Cottage to one of the bloodiest battles in human history, there on the upper reaches of the River Somme.

The following morning, his company entered the village square, and kicked away, underfoot, the stone fragments of saints. The church was a smoking stump, and they saw that its bell-tower had crushed two houses as it fell. Cows wandered the streets, mad and fevered with not having been milked.”
― Alison MacLeod