Three Girls Quotes

“Sometimes, when you're deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don't carry a distaff. They're not Fates, or anything terrible; they don't affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grown on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest.....

...on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising above the sea....Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moon-spinners start their work once more....”
― Mary Stewart, The Moon-Spinners

“There are several books on Walter Potter---one is called Sweet Death: A Feast With Kittens; another, The Victorian Visionary: Inventor of Kitsch. There are some on carnivals, fairgrounds, prison murals, prison art, and a hefty book with a title in gold, Portraits of Icons: From Alexamenos Graffito to Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper. There are also books I have seen before, books I used to, until very recently when I lost my suitcase, own. One is a book on the abstract expressionist Bernice Bing; colors from her piece Burney Falls cascade down the spine---deep red, tinged with orange, outlined in black against white, brown and peach like skin. There's a book on the performance artist Senga Nengudi too, and another on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil. I take this last one off the shelf, and it falls open to a middle page, which has a picture of her painting Three Girls on it. I stand there for a moment, looking at the three girls' faces: calm, patiently waiting. They are huddled close together, as though perhaps they are sisters, but I don't think they could be; they look too different.
I had a postcard of this painting taped to my wall while I was growing up. It was blank on the other side, but I kept it because I had found it tucked in the wooden frame of one of Dad's paintings. It went missing at some point, but while I had it, I looked at it often and felt that I knew---like really knew, as though I had a sense about these things---that the girls depicted were vampires, and that they were still out there in the world, looking exactly the same as when Sher-Gil painted them in 1935, and that I would one day meet them. The painting, I decided when I was a child, depicted the three girls quietly waiting for three brothers to come out of a house so that they could eat them.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“The three shiny blond heads leaned toward the lamp flame. With steam and a bit of black smoke swirling, the image conjured a fairy-tale vision, with Rose Thorn's long tangled hair splayed across her back so voluminously it could have wrapped around all three of them. Together, these sisters were one creature with six arms and legs, animated by flame, not subject to the earth's gravity as much as to one another's.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters