Ananda Braxton-Smith > Quotes

“The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“My mother was a little wild, like all of us who live in lonely places.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“I lay pressed into the fresh-turned ground and wondered what other unknown things lay beneath me in this sog. Black beetles I could see, heaving through the moss, and if I dug I'd find any amount of fine slough-worms. Deeper than the worms I'd find the gembugs, tiny as river-pearls and living always stuck onto spreading slime-roots, glimmering in the dark for nobody.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith

“There are always folk in need of other folk to flesh out their own stories. They need others to join in before they can believe in anything at all. They commonly get about in crowds and ten to ganging up.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“She’s not your mother. She’s not a woman; she’s not even human. From the moment she went over, we lost her just as surely as if she’d died. They do not live for our benefit. They belong to Themselves.”

I remembered the rolling otter and its sweet-looking paws – dashing that urchin with the rock and the blood staining the water. I remembered the jewel-red carb – dragging that scavenged flesh into the sea grass. I’d found them comical, and pretty, but they were their own creatures too, just as my aunt had said, and busy with the job of living. They probably didn’t even see me. I remembered the way the cave spiders and suchlike scurried to hide from me in the rocks.

They were not there for us. They had their own mysterious life living inside them. Their world was not my world, their story not mine.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“Their nasty whispering made me angry. They had a neat way of tucking their point inside something softseeming and neighborly. The cutting edge was hidden in a joke or a piece of advice. It was like being sliced by a tiny blade hidden in a goose feather; it took a moment to realize the wound.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“The living turn quickly from the dead. We can sit deathwatch for a time, but at last their great absence will remind us that we are still present, and we will need to get on with being so. Life is not fussy about where it grows, but it is set on doing so.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“They are webbed at the fingers with something between silk and skin.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“Everything turns into a story the moment it's done. The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“It was to be another blue day, another day when the sky ate everything.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“Without edges the middle disappears.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“The fact is that on that day in the cove, my mother turned to stories. People can do that. What is anybody in the end but the story of themselves?”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“They said as how he'd gotten a taste for cold-blooded flesh from touching her scaly skin, but she was now not salty enough for him.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“I was a chattering mass of bones and teeth from the marrow out.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“You're a delicate lady now, you are." She laughed, poking me until I had to grab her finger and twist it. "Tender. And. Fair.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“She is still with us, in spite of those who tried to steal her. They tried to steal her with enchanted words tucked in stories. They hid her in Mirror tales, which only reflect the longings and dooms of the listeners. They made her invisible in Vanishing tales. They though to hide her in one of those stories from the long dark of midwinter, spiked with murder and the Old Enemy.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“Now here I was; dying. There was nothing to be done and so I did that. The world flowed away from me, there was a rushing and then I noticed and wondered no more.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“Once more, the deep aches and icy trembles shook my body. Strangely, I didn't care as much as last time, and this is why: I knew then that only the living get to feel aches and trembles.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“I don't understand people sometimes. They can be dumb as dirt and crueler than any creature.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“Proof is for those with no eyes or ears in their heads.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow