Rahela

“The King looked keenly at him from under his frosty brows. “Hers are ill deeds; and an unloving mother violates the Ancient Harmonies. Yet you have made her a mother against her will. And that is a thing that has seldom happened in the world before, but will happen often again in the ages that begin. You have done it for love’s sake, in pure longing for a child. But many of those men who are to come will do it for pride’s sake and lust’s; and this breeding of her like a beast will lower the rank and degrade the ancient dignity of woman. Nor will the world go well while that fades, my nephew.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Much as I wanted to think of Lark in someplace better, I knew from a thousand conversations that she never worried abut that place. Maybe it was real and full of saints and poets, or maybe it was poetry itself. Her concern was this place. This animal world with its unfurling dread and convulsive wars and fabricated certainties, and its breathtaking storms across the water. With Willow infiltrating the landscape and its stories coming thick and fast - these explorers getting younger and more innocent - I felt desperate to reach through time. I wanted to find these kids in a moment of calm. To take their lapels gently in my hands and say, "Better is right here." I still hear it in Lark's voice. Better is here. Stay, and make it better.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Woman’s power wanes, but nothing ever passes except to wax again. . . . And if men become tyrants, they shape for themselves the doom of tyrants, who are always betrayed.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse