Beauty

Quotes

1. I learned very soon there was nothing beautiful in that place. Even the things they watched were not beautiful. There was no contrast between beauty and ugliness. There was only ugliness.

   I suppose it was more practical for them. If there had been any beauty at all, people might have wanted that instead. As it was, they didn’t know there was any such thing, so the lack did not bother them.

   p. 83

2. 

   “Where did all the magic go, Janice?”

   “The Church took most of it,” she said, giving me this strange, wild-eyed glare.

   “The Church?” I asked stupidly. It was what Puck had said, but somehow I hadn’t believed it.

   “Making magic,” she said. “All their sacraments are magical. Turning this into that. Making spells to forgive sins. They don’t admit it’s magic, but that’s what it is! ‘The recitation of formulae by an elect, resulting in a condition contrary to reality, is magic.’ But there was only so much of it around. The fairies had it, then the Church took it, and now the Church is losing it to something else. The last days are coming. It’s been foretold.

   p. 315

3. 

   According to Mama, nine-tenths of King Arthur was questing and the other tenth was politics.

   p. 241

4. 

   Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it.

   p. 444

5. 

   We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women’s rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.

   p. 320

6. 

   I wept a time for Mama and for Israfel, but weeping does no good, does it? Sitting down and weeping is what women have done for centuries, and it has done no good at all. Nor praying. God has given us the earth. He is not waiting in the next room, ready to fix it for us if we ruin it. If we do not care for it, no one will. On other worlds, other races of men perhaps do better than we have done. He cares for us, but he does not control what we do.

   p. 458

7. 

   I had told myself it was God’s will when it was nothing of the kind. It was only man’s stupidity.

   p. 287

8. 

   Others are here, many of them from the twentieth. Those who forbade birth control and abortion, worshiping the fetus over all other of God’s creations. They are here in their vestments, their religious garb, their Sunday robes or their everyday dress, carrying their picket signs in swollen and endless parturition, for so the Dark Lord commands that they shall be, endlessly pregnant, endlessly giving birth, endlessly suckling the demonic life that burgeons out of them, with no choice in the matter.

   p. 397

9. 

   There’s some who say magic came from nature, and with men destroying nature right and left, there’s not enough of it left.

   p. 304

10. 

    Innocence. Gone, forever, with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. And innocent laughter gone as well. Now only the dirty giggle, the wicked snigger, the game of out-grossing, the playtime of the beasts.

    So that when the real death stalks

    When the real horror begins

    It will all be familiar and we will be able to enjoy it.

    p. 400

11. 

    “And when a man or a woman climbs, Beauty, he or she can end up as high as the angels or higher.”

    “The saints,” I nodded, thinking I knew.

    “Oh, saints,” Puck said. “Whsst. Saints! Martyrs and virgins and what all. Relics in churches, and both the relic and the churches dead as brass. No. I’ll tell you who climbs. Gardeners climb. And farmers. And painters. And poets. People who build beautiful things without destroying to do it.”

    p. 302

12. 

    On the front page of the newspaper tonight is the announcement of a Mother of the Year Award, given to a mother of eleven children. I wonder what Father Raymond would say? Her eleven children can eat hamburger made from cows who are fed the ephemeral grass that comes after rainforest is cut and burned. They can breathe the already polluted air. They can look forward to growing up and having spaces of their own in the new prefabricated apartment houses now being built in Japan which give each renter one hundred fifty square feet.

    p. 320

13. 

    Then, suddenly, I got old. Up until a year or two ago, I wasn’t…didn’t feel old at all.

    p. 305

14. 

    She likes warmth and frequent good food, and, most of all, fucking. She does not read, does not think, does not care. She would ride twenty miles in bad weather for her lust’s sake, and would not walk twenty paces down a hallway to do a kindness. She emptied her ashes, not out of any sense of cleanliness, but only so her fire would burn so she could be warm. If she wants something, she could kill to get it, and if she does not want something, it might as well not exist so far as she is concerned.

    p. 287

15. 

    Faery is dying from being too few. We need to mix more, to value our children more. Men have too many of them, they’re cheap. The Sidhe have too few, and they seek them like treasure. Man needs what Faery has to give. Fewer children. Longer lives. Less speed. More thought. Mystery and wonder and glamour built in, so to speak, through the slow creation of marvelous things. Less haste and destruction. More appreciation for what’s been given. Like man and Faery were two halves of one thing.

    p. 304

16. 

    Fairy things don’t impress cats. Fairy things and holy things. Cats are, perhaps, a separate creation.

    p. 57

17. 

    There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one’s own youthful awareness.

    p. 404

18. 

    She sighed. “Things the Creator Himself made have perished, Beauty, because of what someone else does. The Holy One makes a tree that lives for four thousand years, and someone chops it down to make paper to package chewing gum. The Creator makes whales who sing in the deep, and men kill them to put their oil in lipsticks.”

    p. 426

19. 

    The sidesaddle was designed to protect a maiden’s virginity, while risking the maiden’s neck. Rather much for rather little, I thought.

    p. 10

20. 

    “Much of life,” he said to me, “depends on our being ignorant of reality. If we understood reality, we would never go on.”

    p. 18

21. 

    Men are like that. They marry for reasons that have nothing to do with what they expect from matrimony and then damn their wives for not being what they want later. They marry for beauty and charm and sex, and then expect their wives to be sensible, parsimonious and efficient.

    p. 32

22. 

    I have noticed that cats are little impressed by religion.

    p. 38

That’s all the quotes.

22 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more