Nikki

“I couldn’t weep here, any more than I could hope. Of course he couldn’t stay: and much as I wanted him by me, I wanted even more that my friend have what he wanted for himself.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“There aren't many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“And I thought, no, the dead are there, and do know themselves and others. I know it’s so; it can’t be otherwise. To be dead, though, isn’t to have further life like ours, just elsewhere; nor is it to live on in the memories of others, or in the dark aliveness of tombs, or in the voices that the still-embodied believe they hear. It’s not like any story that any traveler to that realm has told, or any spirit claiming to have come out of that land either. No. But I believe that even though their life is divided forever from the life we live in the day and the sun, we can know something of it: because we live part of our lives the way they do, in a realm that’s like the realm where they are. I mean in dreams.

In dreams we traverse other geographies; we walk the roads, we enter the rooms, we speak to the people and beings we encounter. We meet our kin and our dead, just as they were in their youth and in ours, or transfigured, not themselves. We see and hear but can’t quite smell or touch. We know ourselves to be there while we are there, but we don’t know we know: it’s only when we wake that we know what we saw and heard and felt. Usually we know that we saw and felt much more, but we can’t retrieve it, and so the experience of it is lost for good; in effect it was never ours.

And I thought that it must be the same in the sleep of death: there, too, we will do deeds, learn truths, pass through landscapes, meet other souls, think about the living, ponder, feel terror and delight, go always further. The difference is this: from death we will never, never ever, wake to know of it.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea