Carol Berg > Quotes

“Books don't prattle. Books don't make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It's a very satisfying partnership.”
― Carol Berg

“So what is this feadnach? Is it another curse that makes me beholden to slaves and shrews?'
'No, my lord. It is your heart. Difficult as it may be to comprehend, there is a possibility you may have one.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation

“Memory has no power but what the soul chooses to make of it.”
― Carol Berg, Daughter of Ancients

“From the instant of our first meeting I judged him so, though it could be said that I was prejudiced. When one is standing naked on a slave-auction block in a wind cold enough to freeze a demon's backside, one is unlikely to have a fair impression of anyone.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation

“On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded.”
― Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit

“Loyalty never put blood back in a man's veins.”
― Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit

“Of all the things I had learned in my life, nothing was so simple as fanatics imagined.”
― Carol Berg, Breath and Bone

“The world goes on, little Seri," he said. "A soldier never dies. His blood makes the grass green for his children.”
― Carol Berg, Guardians of the Keep

“I am indeed afraid, Your Highness. Every moment of my existence carries such a burden of terror you could not imagine it. I fear I have no soul. I fear there are no gods. I fear there is no meaning to the pain I have known. I fear I have lost the capacity to love another human being or ever to see goodness in one. Among such fears as these, my lord, there is little room for you.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation

“Her soul was a fifth season, of richer hue than autumn, bursting with more life than spring, hidden away, ready to transform the world with such glory as it had never seen.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation

“I scorned him for huddling by the fire, and he offered to share his tea. I reviled him for his cowardice at the kai’s lair, and he made me soup. I ridiculed his noble ancestry, and he laughed at himself and cleaned my hearth. I drove him unmercifully in his schooling, and he devoured it as if I’d gifted him with jewels.”
― Carol Berg, Song of the Beast

“But I found steel beneath his soft-spoken manner. I could not break him. Despite his struggles with the tasks I set him, he lived with everything of gentleness and grace.”
― Carol Berg, Song of the Beast

“I tried to think of something equally kind to say, but he seemed to have used up all the eloquence in the room.”
― Carol Berg, Guardians of the Keep

“Our regret would not change what had happened, only make our grief for the big laughing youth more bitter.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation

“We all do as we're told but some days it doesn't seem to matter.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation

“I was not wholly irreverent. I honored all gods who professed an interest in human folk, and I respected custom and rituals that evoked the great mysteries of the world: death and birth, forests, ocean, and storms, music, copulation, and fermentation.”
― Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit

“Humility is a difficult lesson.”
― Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit

“We begin our naming.
The names drop into greens that tighten.

Greens that deepen. The wind
has begun its relentless thinking.
Now the red veins in the small burrowed
creatures begin their murmur.
How the urgency of this red spurts inside us.
Another eye wills itself open. Another eye roves.”
― Carol Berg

“It was impossible to fight any battle without purpose. It was your anchor. Your focus. The place you could fasten everything you had to remember.”
― Carol Berg, Transformation