Odette

“It's pathetic,' was Amanda's first thought as she watched an old woman, in a shapeless black hat dating from the last days of Victoria's reign, hovering over a dreadful tea-cloth embroidered in loud magenta and orange on a pink background of coarse linen, and beaming all across her lined face. "Ay, my granddochter, a' her ain work. She's an awfu' clever lassie," she said to a neighbor. Amanda changed her mind. 'It isn't pathetic at all. It's really rather wonderful, in these days when everything is centralized, and buns come machine-made out of a baker's shop, and hardly anyone knows what a churn is used for! I suppose, sooner or later, these little shows will die out, but I hope it won't be for a very long time. When they go, the last struggle of lonely country places to keep their individuality against the draw of towns will be over.”
― Molly Clavering, Touch Not the Nettle

“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

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“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