Rahela

“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

“But after his going his wife walked alone in the court, and was lonely. For so it was with her always; she did not like to be alone. Perhaps her thin being drew in life and warmth through seeing its beauty mirrored in a lover’s eyes. Perhaps otherwise reality was hard to hold to. The air may have seemed too vast, space a gaping maw.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Then we lost consciousness of the Whole in order to get to be individuals?” he asked. “And now that we are individuals it is our business to get back the consciousness of the Whole? That seems like going around in a circle.” “Eternity is a circle,” replied Gwydion, “for only a circle has no end. . . . But before we were conscious only of our own species; that was all we could grasp of the Whole. And when we recover that wider consciousness it too will have widened; and we shall be one with all species, and know all creatures alike for our fellow beings. But millions of ages will pass before all the world has attained to consciousness of the Whole.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“She cried aloud to the white evening, “Sorrow that is my sorrow! Woe that ever I was born! For the good of two islands has been destroyed through me.” She moaned once, and her heart broke, and she fell . . . Manawyddan kissed her cheek and closed her eyes. “Sleep may be best for you, beloved, for the world that we grew up in is gone, and you were too tired to help build a new. Sleep and find Gwern again, and our brothers. And maybe even Matholuch can find some new tale to tell, there before Arawn’s face. Maybe it can be your comfort at last, not only your shame, that he was a coward. But it is sad my world will be after you, and the light of you gone out of it.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty