Elizabeth Knox > Quotes

“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I'd supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Happiness had never been like this before. Now it came like sun showers, the sun and the rain together. Happiness was happier than it had been - sharp, piercing, and snatched, like a breath while swimming in surf.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Dreamhunter

“I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read”
― Elizabeth Knox, Dreamhunter

“She said to him, ‘You might melt.’ And he said, “If I melt, you can make me again.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Dreamhunter

“Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.'
'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?'
'Yes.'
'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Why do you come here?"
"I promised."
"I release you from your promise!"
"It wasn't you I promised," the angel said quietly.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Do you no longer believe in your luck?'
'You're not my luck, fallen angel, or even my dearest friend. You're my love. My true love.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“What no one else sees, no one else cares about.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire

“Children are uncivilized, so have a staggering power to harm, especially those people whose hearts need mending. In that house an unhappy child was too much rain on a high water table. I poured it on and the terrain liquefied.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Black Oxen

“Don't take this the wrong way, but you seem like the strangest stranger I've ever met.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire

“The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."
Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not."
"I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken."
This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing - a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I don't know what God intends, or what qualifies Him to forgive me,' Sobran said”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Odin is best left out of this. We’re not sure what his intentions are. He’s not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.’ Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. ‘You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?’ ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Your wits seem intact in some matters.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book

“And what of those losses that seem unbearable? Separations from people we feel we can't live without?'
'Perhaps our ruin honours the strength of our love.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“The geologist, six years ago now, hadn't defied anything to climb the hill. He'd had his own powerful magic--the ordinary magic that extraordinarily interested people always have.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire

“Xas was whiteskinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel's neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was worked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a darkhaired girl who has never suckled a child.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Let us think for a moment about Hulagu Khan. His sack of Baghdad’s libraries wasn’t just a gesture of hatred against Islamic culture and Syrian scholarship. He also destroyed the city’s bridges. Hulagu understood the relationship between knowledge and communication, communication and commerce, commerce and power. It is as if he took Baghdad and knocked the teeth out of its head. Not just the teeth that bite, but the teeth that facilitate eating and speech. He crippled the city. Hulagu took treasure and slaves, but he wasn’t a covetous conqueror, he didn’t want to stay and enjoy anything. He just wanted to beat the city down and make sure it stayed down.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book

“So, did you need to hear that? Did you really need to know more?' Xas asked.
'Yes. It's always better to know more.'
'God help you,' Xas said with feeling.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Every day time stopped and Sobran saw Xas, the sun reflecting off his raised wings, white chest watermarked by tears dried in fine dust; bare skin and colourless nipples, as innocent as a child's; the double signature, seagreen and vermilion, awake and vivid; a whitelipped white face and eyes, abysmal, inimical, like the sea seen through holes in an icefield. It was like being in love, this remembering, because Sobran couldn't put Xas out of his mind. And it was like shame. Because he grew so tired defending himself from the pain of this one recollection, Sobran forgot everything else he knew about the angel.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Was it possible yet to be poor and live decently? Were young men still sent to die in wars made by old men?”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book

“Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.”
― Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire

“Xas put his face close to Sobran's and said, soft and succinct, "Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: 'Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.' So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“Xas reappeared and showed every sign of winding himself around Sobran permanently, like -Sobran complained - some parasitic vine.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“I had to give myself up to you for your lifetime. What is faith when you feel you've lost something forever? I had to have you--someone I could lose forever.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“The Great God of the Deserts, the God from the Void, sequestered himself many hundreds of years ago. His worshippers had too many competing views of his nature, and it unsettled his mind. That’s a thing that can happen to gods. They’re very impressionable.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book

“I don't know whether you know this, but there are people in the world with a very odd gift, one that looks like crossed wires. These people firmly believe that every number has a color, and every sound a shape...”
― Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire

“Taryn sighed. ‘You know, there were always people who found cause for complaint about falling birth rates whenever women in developing nations got educations and the means of supporting themselves.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book