Alan Garner > Quotes

“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
― Alan Garner, The Owl Service

“The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.”
― Alan Garner

“... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.”
― Alan Garner, The Voice That Thunders

“Lleu is a hard lord,” said Huw, “He is killing Gronw without anger, without love, without mercy. He is hurt too much by the woman and the spear. Yet what is there when it is done? His pride. No spear. No friend.”
Roger started at Huw. “You’re not so green as you’re grass-looking, are you?” he said. “Now you mention it, I have been thinking— That bloke Gronw was the only one with any real guts at the end.”
“But none of them is all to blame,” said Huw. “It is only together they are destroying each other.”
“That Blod-woman was pretty poor,” said Roger, “however you look at it.”
“No,” said Huw. “She was made for her lord. Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she was longing for the time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns.”
― Alan Garner, The Owl Service

“I wanted us to have a holiday, not a ruddy breakdown.”
― Alan Garner, The Owl Service

“I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.”
― Alan Garner, Boneland

“I hope there isn't,' [a final answer] said Colin. "I'm for uncertainty. As soon as you think you know, you're done for. You don't listen and you can't hear. If you're certain of anything, you shut the door on the possibility of revelation, of discovery. You can think. You can believe. But you can't, you mustn't, 'know'. There's the real Entropy.”
― Alan Garner, Boneland

“‎'They don't know what it's like. Inside. For them it's only fun, even though I tell them it isn't. You see I don't delete. Anything. Ever.”
― Alan Garner, Boneland

“The deed is nothing. It is the thought that breeds fear; and we achieve little by lingering.”
― Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

“That man’s gaga,” said Roger when they were out of hearing. “He’s so far gone he’s coming back.”
― Alan Garner, The Owl Service

“I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option.

"Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.

"It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth."

"It is one of the main errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the 'original form' of myth can be separated from its miraculous elements. 'Wonder is only the first glimpse of the start of philosophy,' says Plato. Aristotle is more explicit: 'The lover of myths, which are a compound of wonders, is, by his being in that very state, a lover of wisdom.' Myth encapsulates the nearest approach to absolute that words can speak.”
― Alan Garner, The Voice That Thunders

“But what can we do?” said Susan.
“Think, and hope,” said Cadellin.
“I would rather seek and find,” said Uthecar.”
― Alan Garner

“Why are you here?"
"To fetch the woman I cut from the veil of the rock."
“Why did you cut?"
"To send her spirit out, so that she would come to make the child, for me to teach to dance and sing and dream, to free the beasts within the rock to fill the world."
“Have you found her?"
"She is not here. There are only people horrible to see."
“Where are your stories?" said the other.
"I cannot tell them. My head is a cloud.”
― Alan Garner, Boneland

“It's not a job but a condition.
(Alan Garner on writing)”
― Alan Garner

“He cut the veil of the rock; the hooves clattered the bellowing waters below him in the dark. The lamp brought the moon from the blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.”
― Alan Garner, Boneland

“The prince went straight to the king of dragons, who took him on his back to the distant mountain, and with his fire he split the crystal, and the red fox that had shimmered like a ruby in its clear heart ran out. But the king of eagles pounced on it from the sky, and ripped the fur a darker red. Up sprang the raven, and fled on the wind, but the king of falcons closed with it, and the talons met in the raven’s heart.”
― Alan Garner, Collected Folk Tales

“Roland searched for a place that would be safe to climb, and found a staircase on the exposed inner wall of a house. The top step was the highest part of the house: everything above it, including the bedroom floor, had been knocked down. Roland tested his weight, but the wood was firm, so he went up.”
― Alan Garner, Elidor

“The more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have “invented” an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.”
― Alan Garner, Alan Garner Classic Collection

“For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone. It is, on the instant, Then. Surely.”
― Alan Garner, Treacle Walker

“You and I and everyone else are a bit like turtles: we only make progress when we stick our necks out a little.”
― Alan Garner, Conversationally Speaking: Tested New Ways to Increase Your Personal and Social Effectiveness

“There...is your spiritual obligation to literature: root out the reductive; seek excellence; pursue the numinous. And, along with a disciplined intellect (for one is of no use without the other) give to children their imaginations, of which they are being robbed with totalitarian intensity by the trash around them.”
― Alan Garner, The Voice That Thunders

“The wood lay still. The air throbbed with insects, and flies hovered and disappeared and hovered. Meadowsweet grew in a mist of flowers, and the sun glinted on the threads of caterpillars which hung from the trees as thick as rain. “By,” said Gwyn, “there’s axiomatic.”
― Alan Garner, Alan Garner Classic Collection

“What the eye doesn’t see,”’ said the man, ‘“the heart doesn’t grieve for.” Or does it?”
― Alan Garner, Treacle Walker

“We have to tell stories to unriddle the world”
― Alan Garner

“Oh, drop dead, you miserable cow.”
― Alan Garner

“I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do.”
― Alan Garner

“But when they reached Highmost Redmanhey, Susan said, “Uthecar, what’s wrong with the elves? I – don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve always imagined them to be – well, the ‘best’ of your people.”

“Ha!”, said Uthecar. “They would agree with you! And few would gainsay them. You must judge for yourselves. But I will say this of the lios-alfar; they are merciless without kindliness, and there are things incomprehensible about them.”
― Alan Garner, The Moon of Gomrath

“Is there light in Gorias?”
― Alan Garner, Elidor

“At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.”
― Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

“The walls were shedding their texture and taking another in the pouncing feathers. Gwyn”
― Alan Garner, Alan Garner Classic Collection