Stephanie

“In later life, wherever I went, I always looked for the women of Troy who'd been scattered all over the Greek world. That skinny old woman with brown-spotted hands shuffling to answer her master's door, can that really be Queen Hecuba, who, as a young and beautiful girl, newly married, had led the dancing in King Priam's hall? Or that girl in the torn and shabby dress, hurrying to fetch water from the well, can that be one of Priam's daughters? Or the ageing concubine, face paint flaking over the wrinkles in her skin, can that really be Andromache, who once, as Hector's wife, stood proudly on the battlements of Troy with her baby son in her arms?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Wynn looked downstream at the course of sky curving away between walls of living woods. Soon the channel of firmament would pulse with a star, then three, then a hundred, and it would keep filling and deepening until the stars sifted and flowed between the tops of the trees in their own river, whose coves and bends would mirror the one they were on...The river of stars would find its way to its own bay and its own ocean of constellations and Wynn imagined, as he had before, that the water and the stars might sing to each other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear.”
― Peter Heller, The River

“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

“The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.”
― Peter Heller, The River