Elizabeth Hand > Quotes

“But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Illyria

“You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Illyria

“Endless longing; a face you'd known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you'd die for, and die of.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Illyria

“No lights shone beyond the windows of his room. The reflection from the bedside lamp seemed insubstantial as a candle flame; the darkness outside a solid mass, huge and inescapable, that pressed against the panes. His room sat beneath the eaves, where the wind didn't roar but crooned, a sound like mourning doves.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Strange Stories

“At the door I paused. 'So what was your spirit animal?'

'A dolphin. Fun in the sun, endless summer. What about you?'

'Dee Dee Ramone,' I said, and left.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss

“If the retreat house was a trap, it was a very nice one.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon

“[Poetry] was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Radiant Days

“It wasn't exactly like I'd sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I'd never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon

“It was beyond desolate: it was where desolation goes to be by itself.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss

“Arianna simply wasn’t up to it. She had a pretty voice, she could carry a tune—that was never a problem. But she had no depth. She couldn’t interpret a song, place her stamp on it. Unlike Lesley, who fairly stomped on it! And that’s what you need in folk music. These are songs that have been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god’s sake! So the only way those songs lived and got passed on was by singers. The better singer you were, the more likely it was people were going to turn out to hear you and remember you—and remember the song—whether it was at a pub or wedding or ceilidh or just a knot of people seeking shelter under a tree during a storm. It’s a kind of time machine, really, the way you can trace a song from whoever’s singing it now back through the years—Dylan or Johnny Cash, Joanna Newsom or Vashti Bunyan—on through all those nameless folk who kept it alive a thousand years ago. People talk about carrying the torch, but I always think of that man they found in the ice up in the Alps. He’d been under the snow for 1,200 years, and when they discovered him, he was still wearing his clothes, a cloak of woven grass and a bearskin cap, and in his pocket they found a little bag of grass and tinder and a bit of dead coal. That was the live spark he’d been carrying, the bright ember he kept in his pocket to start a fire whenever he stopped. You’d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that’s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark. Folk music is like that. And by folk I mean whatever music it is that you love, whatever music it is that sustains you. It’s the spark that keeps us alive in the cold and night, the fire we all gather in front of so we know we’re not alone in the dark. And the longer I live, the colder and darker it gets. A song like “Windhover Morn” can keep your heart beating when the doctors can’t. You might laugh at that, but it’s true.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upwards to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Poe's Children: The New Horror

“I should have been more frightened; that came later.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“I nodded, unsure if Ted sounded admiring or angry. 'I waded in but I couldn't find him. I mean, is it possible - the water wasn't deep enough for him to drown. It doesn't make any sense.'

'My band made four brilliant albums and never had a single goddamn hit. We were supposed to be the American Rolling Stones, and we couldn't get more than five minutes of airplay. Does that make sense?' Ted stubbed out his cigarette.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Radiant Days

“You’d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that’s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“has proved to be true. You have a first city as you have a first lover, and this was mine.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon

“Some call me witch, and through their hatred they’ve taught me how to be one…”
― Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill

“But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play—those take place in sacred time. It’s like this—” He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles. “—a circle within a circle. Do you see? This big circle is profane time. This one’s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it—like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days—or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differently. When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways into a different space that’s inside the normal world. It’s folded in. Do you see?”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“Our gaze changes all that it falls upon. ”
― Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss

“People forget that the colliers didn’t just bring the canaries into the mines to warn them against the gases. They took them down because they sang so beautifully, even in the dark.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“It can fuck you up, if you meet the most important person in your life when you’re sixteen, seventeen. You imprint on them, and you never escape from it. That’s what happened to me.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Hard Light

“It was a big deal when a new record came out; you’d buy it then find one of your mates who had a stereo and everyone would come over to listen to it together for the first time.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“But mostly I'm just respectful of old ways. I believe things for a reason, and in the old days they did things for a reason. And if you don't understand why—well, you might end up opening a few doors better left closed. That's all.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“There are no trees in Iceland," - "We have a joke, do you know it?"
She took a breath, then said, "What do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland?"
I shook my head. "I dunno."
"Stand up.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wizards: Magical Tales From the Masters of Modern Fantasy

“But it was just a paperback by Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and Profane. “Do you know this?” He held it in those big hands as though it were a butterfly he’d caught. “It’s brilliant. There’s two kinds of time, he says—sacred time and profane time. The outside, everyday world—you know, where you go to work, go to school, sort of thing—that’s profane time. “But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play—those take place in sacred time. It’s like this—” He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles. “—a circle within a circle. Do you see? This big circle is profane time. This one’s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it—like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days—or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differently. When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways into a different space that’s inside the normal world. It’s folded in. Do you see?”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“But there was that one night when we all lay around in the dark and felt—something. I think it only happens when you’re young. This weird sense of possibility; a kind of knowledge. You know there’s a door, and even if you can’t see it, you can sense it opening, and if you’re quick enough, you can slip inside.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

“They looked like her, or she looked like them. Something in between, something she didn’t know the name of but recognized. A lightness filled her, the way it had when her mother had cut her hair and she’d first put on boys’ clothes. She opened her mouth and let the lightness escape, almost surprised not to see a bubble or a balloon floating away from her, like in the pictures in front of her. How could one feel like this and not be flying? Like the Aerostat or a balloon; like Harriet before she”
― Elizabeth Hand, Curious Toys

“Remember me at Winterlong.”
― Elizabeth Hand

“Me, I drink to remember. If the right music’s playing, if it’s dark enough and I’m loaded, I can sometimes catch a flicker of that 3:00 A.M. feeling I used to live for.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Available Dark

“Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Last Summer at Mars Hill

“People think they want the truth. But the truth is that people want to be reassured that it’s only there that the horror lies, there on the other side of the television, the computer screen, the world. No one wants to look on the charred remains of a human corpse lying at their feet. No one wants to look on unalloyed grief and horror and loss. I don’t always want to myself, but I won't deny that I do, and I won't deny that my photos show you what's really there. I can't look away.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss