Margaret Elphinstone > Quotes

“If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.”
― Margaret Elphinstone

“Wherever the living are,’ whispered my foster mother, ‘the dead will be there too.”
― Margaret Elphinstone, The Sea Road

“But all through the evening every time I looked at him I'd find his blue eyes fixed on me, with that naked look one can't help recognizing, and can't help remembering either that one has a certain power and occasionally men are vulnerable to it, and sometimes one ends up hurting them. But when it's happening it all seems worth it, and in the end too: however it ends I think, as far as I can tell so far, it still stays worth it.”
― Margaret Elphinstone, Hy Brasil: A novel