Oliver Zelman’s Reviews > HERmione > Status Update

“The stars are shining all of them, but I can’t see any. She felt like a star invisible in daylight. Then her thought widened and the tension snapped as swiftly. It’s like a violin string. It’s like Fayne exactly.”

“Her had realized that birds made a pattern, made a hieroglyphic for people, wise men, augurers. Fayne was a bird, that swallow, flown here simply. People would not see her or, seeing her, regarded her bitterly, as an outcast. Fayne was a swallow making a pattern across a window.”

“It is the pulsing of a willow, the faint note of some Sicilian shepherd. Your writing is the thin flute holding you to eternity. Take away your flute and you remain, lost in a world of unreality.”

“All your life you will retain one or two bits of colour with which all your life will be violently or delicately tinted.”

“In Hermione Gart, the two never fused and blended, she was both mossgrown, inbedded and at the same time staring with her inner vision in forever-tumbled breakers. If she went away, her spirit would break; if she stayed, she would be suffocated.”