He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best… — John Crowley
He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn't believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, "Don't you want it to be a surprise?"
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:
This was the problem: if what had to be discovered lay in the what-was-to-be, then they could discover that easily enough. It was what-had-been that was hard to keep in mind. That's the way it is for beings who are immortal or nearly so; they know the future, but the past is dark to them; beyond the present year is the door into aeons-ago.
Sophie's hard first question to the cards had not, precisely, gone without an answer, it had been transmuted into questions about the question. It had branched and rooted like a tree, growing questions like buds, and then at some moment all the questions had become one question: what tree is this?
