Charlotte Vale Allen
TimeSteps
"Don't blame Bobby for this, Bea. I know you
wanted him to tell Ludie to go to hell, but he
couldn't do that and you knew all along he
couldn't. But you hoped he would, didn't you? You
wanted him to be just a little more than he is.
I'm sorry."
"I'm starting to feel as if there's too much
going on, too many people in every room."
"You think that because you're capable of
caring for two men, for totally different
reasons, it makes you unworthy of the love of
either one of them." Seeing that this was
indeed teh crux of the matter, he went on.
"Where does it say we're only allowed to care
for one person at a time? Where is that
written? And have you ever considered how
exceptional you are to be able to give
such a lot of yourself without ever claiming
to feel cheated in any way or left wanting? I
know for a fact you never have. You give and
give and give, and then feel guilty because
your emotional funds are temporarily running a
little low. Somewhere along the line you've
got to accept accept taht it's your right to
take as well as give.
"Play it seriously. They key to comedy is the
characters' belief in what's happening to
them... I think you may find it helps your
focus if you keep the idea firmly in mind that
your character doesn't find any of this the
least bit amusing.
...and Becky had said, "I feel homeless. I
don't know where I belong. I used to think I'd
stop feeling that way when I fell in love, but
I felt even more homeless when I did. I guess
I thought whoever I loved would bring me home
with him, but taht wasn't the way it was at
all."
"I didn't pick it, you know! I didn't
reach into the hat and select fear as my
primary emotion for the decade."
"What've I been doing all these years, if not
playing mother to you? There are more ways
than one to give a life, Bea. Sometimes, I
think we're all just displaced mothers and
daughters, looking for the right mother, the
right daughter, because the one we got wasn't
the one we should've had. So we go out in the
world and find people who fit our needs."
"Yeah, there was a conflict. I loved
both of them. The problem was we both
couldn't be married to her, and we knew it. So
we made the best arrangements we could."
Aristotle
Reason is a light that God has kindled in the
soul.
-- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Art of Rhetoric
Lynette Baughman
A scorpion can live up to 25 years, and it
has the slowest metabolism of any invertebrate
on earth. Some scorpions survive for more than
a year without eating. When food supplies are
low, pregnant females reabsorb nutrients from
their own embryos, slowing the embryo's rate
of development. The gestation can take up to a
year and a half. Then when food is abundant,
embryonic growth can speed up.
--Encounter w/a Desert
Killer, Reader's Digest 10/95
Clive Barker, Galilee
"You're like the fingers of his hand, digging in the dirt while he counts his bales of wool. He doesn't even notice that the hand's digging. He doesn't see it drop seeds into the hole. He's amazed when he finds a tree's grown up beside him, filled with sweet fruit and singing birds. But it was his hand did it."
The youth looked down at the ground. "What do you mean by this?" he said.
"That we do not belong to ourselves. That though we cannot know the full purpose of our creation, we should look to those who came before us to understand it better. Not just our fathers and our mothers, but all who went before. They are the pathway back to God, who may not know, even as He counts stars, that we're quietly digging a hole, planting a seed..."
Most of the time, it was as though they didn't even know what they were doing, good, bad or indifferent. They lived in a kind of trance of self-absorption, as though the rest of the world was simply a mirror held up to their faces, and they passed through life seeing only themselves.
It was a hard world, and love kept no harm. All it could do, sometimes, was speed the healing of the wounds.
"A nun. Her name was Mary-Elizabeth Bowen. She died in the forties, at the age of a hundred and one."
I was a very narrow creature at my heart,
Until you came.
None got in and out of me with ease;
Yet when you spoke my name
I was unbounded, like the world.
I never felt such fear as then, being so limitless,
When I'd known only walls and whisperings.
I fled you foolishly;
Looked in every quarter for a place to hide.
Went into a bud, it blossomed.
Went into a cloud, it rained.
Went into a man, who died,
And bore me out again,
Into your arms.
Of Nathaniel, of course, there was no sign. He had gone, riding the spirit of my horse away, wherever the souls of the loyal and the loving go.
It seems I am,
It seems I was,
It seems I will
Be born, because
It seems I am -
I'm still following in Zelim's footsteps; traveling blind but in hope. Of what? Perhaps of a little wisdom; a clue to the question I'd wanted answered by Nicodemus: what am I for? It's probably too much to expect; the world grants an answer to that question rarely, I think, and when it does usually makes the recipients pay dearly for the information. The tree of that knowledge has its roots at Golgotha.
Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code
I was with you in the beginning, in the dawn of all that was holy, I bore you from the womb before the start of day.
Although the altar layout resembled that of a linear Christian chapel, the furnishings were stark and cold, bearing none of the traditional ornamentation. "Bleak," he whispered.
Tebing chuckled. "Church of England. Anglicans drink their religon straight. Nothing to distract from their misery.
"You're telling me this group is a pagan goddess worship cult?"
"More like the pagan goddess worship cult.
She was a sentry. And tonight, the ancient wheels had been set in motion. The arrival of this stranger at the base of the obelisk was a signal from the brotherhood.
It was a silent call of distress.
If that floor panel is ever broken, the faceless messenger had told her, it means that the upper echelon has been breached. One of us has been mortally threatened and has been forced to tell a desperate lie. Call the numbers. Warn the others. Do not fail us in this.
It was a silent alarm... If the identity of one brother was compromised, he could tell a lie that would start in motion a mechanism to warn the others.
The quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdelene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one.
At its heart, the quest for the Holy Grail has always been the quest for the Magdalen; the wronged Queen, entombed with proof of her family's rightful claim to power.
The Templar Revelation
Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar
Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail
The Goddess in the Gospels
Reaching for the Sacred Feminine
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
"But with all the books written about it, why isn['t this theory more widely known?"
These books con't possibly compete with centrueies of established history, especially when that history is endorsed by the ultimate bestseller of all time.
Fortimat's eyes went wide. "Don't tell me Harry Potter is about the Holy Grail?"
"I was referring to the Bible."
Fartimat cringed. "I know that."
Martin Caiden
Encounter Three
I was doing theoretical studies of force
fields when I was introduced to some new work
involving the collapse of electron fields. In
effect, this meant being able to compress or
reduce the diameter of electron orbits about
an atom . . . when you tighten up an orbit you
increase its speed.
In essence, we discovered that the
compression field was acting as a . . .
consider it a storage battery. If we put in x
quantity of energy to collapse the electron
orbits, we discovered that over a certain
period of time we got back that same x
quantity in power outflow. It was like putting
energy into a bank. The moment we stopped
pouring it into the bank, the bank started to
return the deposit. We found out that if we
primed the force field for a period of
thirty-eight days, we would get back
thirty-eight days of equal output of energy.
The moment we stopped feeding the compression
field, the electrons, still within the force
field, remember, began to return to their
normal paths. That meant they were giving up
the energy required to collapse their orbits
in the first place.
Nor is our interest the imposition of global
peace--an impossible task. Our interest, Mr.
Brady, lies in preventing the destruction of
the world civilization.
Did you know that at least twenty nations
have sperm banks in cryogenic storage? Those
sperm banks are buried far beneath the sea, in
underground caverns, high in mountains. They
have only one purpose . . . They have been
prepared for the day when all mature males
left alive with have been rendered sterile by
radioactivity.
Star Bright
The neutrino was a mysterious but real
neutral particle with no known mass, without
an electrical charge, moving at the speed of
light. The thing could travel through fifty
light years of solid lead without slowing
down. To the neutrino the concept of mass or
density did not exist. It was affected only by
force fields.
Zoboa
A plant, Bannon, is someone who's put into
place many years before he's ever needed. He
fits in. He's a part of the local scenery. And
until that moment when he gets his call you'll
never know it. Never.
"Lovely lady, after Siberia . . . nothing
worries me. I died more than thirty years ago.
you cannot hurt a dead man, so I enjoy life
and I do not worry."
"Bullshit. The one ingredient that makes
slavery work is the slave. And you know why?
Because he's afraid to die. Because he hopes.
Because he'll do anything to stay alive, and
so long as that word anything is in his
vocabulary, you'll have slave masters."
Glen Cook
But they planted their captive god over the
grave of their enemy, where it would keep him
enchained. . . . It all fits. The beasts. The
impossible talking rocks. Coral reefs a
thousand miles from the sea. It all leaked
through from that other world. The change
storms are the tree's dreams.
--p 697, The White
Rose
Rosemary Edgehill, Speak Daggers To Her
I avoided her. The new ones are always
trouble, looking for god or guru or someonw to
tell them the True Facts, and ready to latch
onto anyone who will hold still long enough
and "Yes, my Lady" her to death.
There are some people in the Community who
enjoy that, like Reisha the Wonder Witch
wither her forty-member coven of eternal First
Degrees.
I felt the energy as soon as I crossed the
threshold. It's not a particularly witchy
trick -- you do it all the time: Ever walk
into a room full of people and know a
fight's in progress? Or come home, and not
even bother to give a yell because you
know there's nobody there? Maybe you don't
talk about things like that, but Witches do,
and we have to call the reason-for-knowing
something. So we call it energy, most of us.
Whatever it is, it's the thing that changes.
By the time they got around to passing the
wine cup -- what Belle always calls Sacred
Cookies and Milk Time...
Tarot is a way of sorting out what's bothering
you and getting advice from the best-informed
source -- you -- in a way taht you're likely
to listen to.
And now I had to do something about it,
without doing something Evil myself, because
if I looked at it and called it by its True
Name and then walked away, it had me. You
aren't born with a soul. You purchase it in
installments. And I'd just been handed the
bill for the next one.
James Herriot
...the girl straightened up quickly, pushing
back a few strands of dark hair from her
forehead. She was about eighteen with delicate
features and large, expressive eyes; in her
wild, pinched prettiness there was something
of the wheeling curlews, the wind and sun, the
wide emptiness of the moors.
--p 448, All Creatures Great
& Small
John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson
Monkey on a Stick -- Murder, Madness, and the
Hare Krishnas
Wheeler liked to think of sannyasis as
materialism's living dead, the visible souls
of believers who reounced all possessions,
severed all relations with their wives and
children, declared themselves celibate, and
left home to wander in search of God. In
India, the vow is understood to be so profound
nad final that a soon-to-be sannyasi must
appear in court, where his will is read. Teh
magistrate then declares him dead under civil
law.
The swami preached love; his God was a
playful, sensual, blue-skinned boy.
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna
Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare
"With Catholicism, you sin and confess, sin
and confess. It says here that Krishna
Consciousness is like unplugging a fan. Your
soul keeps spinning because it has built up a
lot of karma. But eventually, the spinning
will stop."
According to the swami's teaching, the atman,
the Hindu equivalent of the soul, was like a
light burning deep within. It had been buried
by several lifetimes of accumulated dirt --
residue from the senses that demanded constant
gratification, and the ego that demanded
money, power, and prestige. The senses had to
be harnessed, the ego defeated. That was done
by renouncing the world, by meditating and
chanting, and by living for God.
Krishna, the cowherd boy. This beautiful,
flute-playing blue boy is God, the
all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent,
energy-giver to the cosmos.
Kierkegaard - The Journals
Evil mediocrity, is never so dangerous as
when it is dressed up as `sincerity'.
Stephen King
On Writing
She hated her new job, I think -- in their
effort to take care of her, her sisters turned
out self-sufficient, funny slightly nutty
mother into a sharecropper living a laregely
cashless existence.
When you're still too young to shave,
optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to
failure.
"When you write a story, you're telling
yourself the story," he said. "When you
rewrite, your main job is taking out all the
things that are not the story."
Gould said something else that was
interesting... write with the door closed,
rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts
out being just for you, in other words, but
then it goes out. Once you know what the story
is and get it right -- as right as you can,
anyway -- it belongs to anyone who wants to
read it.
A Gradual Canticle for Augustine
The thinnest bear is awakened
in the winter
by the sleep-laughter of locusts,
by the dream-blustering of bees,
by the honeyed scent of desert sands
that the wind carries in her womb
into the distant hills, into the houses of
Cedar.
The bear has heard a sure
promise
Certain words are edible; they nourish
more than snow heaped upon silver plates
or ice overflowing golden bowls. Chips of
ice
from the mouth of a lover are not always
better,
Nor a desert dreaming always a mirage.
The rising bear sings a gradual canticle
woven of sand that conquers cities
by a slow cycle. His praise seduces
a passing wind, traveling to the sea
wherein a fish, caught in a careful net,
bears a bear's song in the cool-scented
snow.
Cables seemed to run through the poem,
tightening the lines until they almost hummed.
I found the combination of crafty diction and
delirious imagery exciting and illuminating.
Her poem also made me feeli that I wasn't
alone in my belief that good writing can be
simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven.
They point is that it was a reasonable poem
in a hysterical time, one sprung from a
writing ethic that resonated all through my
heart and soul.
I probably look like a freshly released young
convict, tall and hungry and very likely not
bolted together right.
It starts with this: put your desk in the
corner and every time you sit down to write,
remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of
the room. Life isn't a support system for
art. It's the other way around.
I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts
to 2000 words.
What you know makes you unique in some
other way. Be brave. Map the enemy's
positions, come back, tell us all you know.
And remember that plumbers in space is not
such a bad setup for a story.
It's also important to know what to
describe and what can be left alone while you
get on with your main job, which is telling a
story.
...if I describe mine, it freezes out yours,
and I lose a little bit of the bond of
understanding I want to forge between us.
Description begins in the writer's imagination
but should finish in the reader's.
Try any goddamn thing you like, no matter how
boringly normal or outrageous. If it works,
fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if
you love it. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once
said, "Murder your darlings," and he was
right.
Mostly I don't see stuff like that until the
story's done. Once it is, I'm able to kick
back, read over what I've written, and look
for underlying patterns. If I see some, I can
work at bringing them out in a scond, more
fully realized, draft of the story.
If I write rapidly, putting down my story
exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking
back to check the names of my characters and
the relevant parts of their back stories, I
find that I can keep up with my original
enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the
self-doubt that's always waiting to settle in.
How long you let your book rest is entirely
up to you, but I think it should be a minimum
of six weeks.
With six weeks' worth of recuperation time,
you'll also be able to see any glaring holes
in the plot or character development. I'm
talking about holes big enough to drive a
truck through. It's amazing how some of these
things can elude a writer while she or he is
occupied with the daily work of composition.
Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.
jotted on a manuscript rejected in 1966
The most important things to remember about
back story are that (a)everyone has a history
and (b)most of it isn't very interesting.
Stick to the parts that are, and don't get
carried away with the rest.
The Stand
The womb of his young wife had borne a single
dark and malignant child.
Sometimes, he thought, love is silent as well
as blind.
At the center of this room where her mother's
spirit dwelt was the clock.
He stopped wanting to communicate, and
when that happens the thinking process itself
began to rust and disintegrate.
Randall Flagg, the dark man...
He was a clot looking for a place to happen,
but he recalled that walk often especially
after she began to jitter apart like some
indifferently made toy.
He thought best in scenes like these. In
scenes like these, any man could be Iago.
No soul, but a sense of humor. There was
that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee.
...there was something in her that we very
much did not like. Some restless instability.
No one can tell what goes on in between the
person you were and the person you become. No
one can chart that blue and lonely section of
hell. There are no maps of the change. You
just... come out ono the other side.
Or you don't.
If she had been around to hear Stu Redman and
Glen Bateman discussing the capricious -- it
had seemed capricious to them, anyhow -- way
the superflu had taken some animals while
leaving others alone, she would have laughed.
It had taken the domestic animals and left the
wild ones alone, it waa as simple as that.
...Harold knew things. It was good
that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as
if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with
them -- more or less omnicient, but
emotionally unstable and likely to fracture at
any time.
Because everything is lying around, waiting
to be picked up again.
He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the
soft and slightly amazed way of all plain
woman who have discovered a nice man in a hard
world.
Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride
the third man's body and gave a long, primeval
scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith
for the rest of her life.
But Nadine had always and forever belonged
only to Nadine. She was the earth's child.
She had waited too long for the other one,
through too many dry years.
Government is an idea, Stu. That's
really all it is, once you strip away the
bureaucracy and the bullshit.
"Sure," Glen said glumly. "If you want to
short-circuit the democratic process, ask a
sociologist."
The whole range of human perception seemed to
have stepped up a notch.
It was as if she had been eclipsed; but by a
dark star rather than a bright one.
Mayhap the man in the West is the wheel on
which you will be broken. I am not allowed to
know.
Judith Krantz
I'll Take Manhattan
She realized that she hadn't been herself
since she first laid eyes on him but she
didn't know how to become herself with
this man, who certainly had not been affected
by her in the same way as any other man or boy
she'd ever met... She was filled with all the
unutterable confusion and single-minded
passion of first love.
"It isn't even Art Deco."
"It isn't art anything," Maxi snapped,
"unless it's Depression Repugnant."
Scruples
I saw how fascinating her mystery was to you.
For my part, I think that the mystery is
always greatest where there is the most -
emptiness. A person full of life is never
mysterious, on the contrary. If Garbo had had
something to say for herself, she'd be just
another woman now.
I'm perfectly swell, except for a nasty heart
murmur, those mysterious shooting pains in my
head, a spastic colon, and fallen arches. But
I can't complain, I think my hearing is coming
back in one ear, and I barely fainted at all
yesterday.
Valentine, these two people didn't know the
first thing about the long way around into the
heart of love; they were impatient, they kept
getting sidetracked, they missed obvious
opportunities, they were so busy that they
didn't give each other a chance; when one
zigged, the other zagged, but all along,
without knowing it, ridiculous timing and all,
they were becoming completely necessary to
each other...
Scruples II
Why couldn't any fucking woman he'd ever met
in his life understand busy?
Sasha:
Attitude, the key is all attitude. It's
entirely a mental concept. I make all my own
rules. I'm capricious, I'm arbitrary, and when
I'm feeling unusually kind and at my best, I'm
still erratic and wayward.
Now, Billy realized, as sleep resisted her
completely, she'd worked herself into a state
of horrifying clearheadedness. Her mind felt
like a bare plain, scoured by wind and rain
and a blazing sun, a plain on which no grass
cold possibly be expected to grow.
Margaret Lawrence
Hearts and Bones
Had he wanted to believe that the wars of
women are not so bitter as the wars of men?
It made her seem fragile and a little remote
in winter, as though she were made of bone,
and grew brittle.
Perhaps she did, for memory lives in the
bones and asks a heavy price in the dark, slow
winters of the North.
Dennis Lehane
Shutter Island
Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in
time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside
the picture and say, "No, no, no. It's okay,
it's okay. Sssh." You wanted to hold her until
the shakes stopped, tell her that everything
would be all right.
They shook hands and he remembered what Chuck
has said to him in the dream -- "I'm never
getting off this island" -- and Teddy felt a
sparrow's ghost pass through the center of his
chest and flap its wings.
Jessica March, Tempations
Then there were hands, cool hands sliding
over her skin, cool like water poured on her
petals. God, was she a flower?
Sharyn McCrumb, The Rosewood Casket
Her people loved the land as children love a
mother, but the whites' love seemed to be the
longing men felt for a beautiful and fertile
woman.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche
Battle not with monsters lest ye become a
monster; and if you gaze into the abyss the
abyss gazes also into you.
William A Nolan, MD - The Making of a Surgeon
"You haven't seen many suicide attempts,
Mike...so let me give you a tip. If they use a
knife they'll frequently be unsuccessful. Like
this guy. When he throws his head back to make
the cut, the carotid arteries get back in
behind the muscle. The trachea comes forward
and generally that's the only big structure
they get.
In the wrist the same sort of thing happens.
The guy bends his wrist back to make the gash.
When he does the artery disappears behind the
edge of the bone. He cuts a few small veins.
If he bent his wrist forward it would be a
different story.
"Those maggots sure keep an ulcer clean," she
said. "Not much to look at, but they do the
job."
She was right. The maggots had eaten the dead
tissue, and the ulcer looked red and healthy.
Whenever you think about doing a tracheotomy,
do it. If you follow the rule you avoid
letting bad situations get worse because of a
natural reluctance to make a hole in a man's
neck. A tracheotomy allows you to suck out
mucus and makes breathing much easier for the
patient.
Joel Rosenberg - Guardians of the Flame
Somewhere, somehow, Nehera'a spirit had been
broken, beyond Karl's ability to repair
it.
--p 110, The Silver
Crown
Magic is like cocaine, Karl, assuming you
have the genes that let you work it in the
first place. Anyone who does can handle a bit
now and then, but everybody has his limits.
Once you get beyond those limits, you're
hooked.
--p 115, The Silver
Crown
That was the danger of fighting two-swords
style: the temptation to overuse the dagger.
Too often, that required turning your body to
squarely face your opponent, exposing your
torso to a direct attack. Much better to keep
it turned at a 45-degree angle away from your
opponent, bring the right arm and its long
sword out, the other held back as a
reserve.
--p 128, The Heir
Apparent
Andy. He missed her so much. They had been
together ever since the Hand tabernacle, and
in that time he had never had another woman.
It wasn't that there hadn't been
opportunities, it wasn't that he hadn't been
tempted, it was something very simple: She
could chase away the darkness, if only for a
while.
--p 186, The Heir
Apparent
If you haven't ever made something from cold
iron and fire, you won't understand how very
much trouble it is, how every hammer stroke
puts something of you in it, even if all
you're making is something ... humble.
--p 157, The Road to
Ehvenor
Sharon Shinn
There's no future in loving people who are
hurt. If you heal them, they don't need you
anymore. If you don't heal them, they destroy
you. I think I have destroyed enough men in my
life.
Love does not fall on an untouched heart
Or seed in a garden chaste.
Until is once has been plowed apart
The heart is a desert waste.
Heart of Gold
He moved through the apartment like a fallen
angel across unsanctified gorund -- graceful,
feral, and lawless.
She had not felt so abandoned or adrift since
the day her father died. That was the day she
had known, in her blook cellss and her bones,
that the world was an empty place echoing with
ghostly winds.
Mark Twain
She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
Elizabeth Walker
The Court
It wasn't Mara who carried the case
downstairs. In the world there were
butterflies and there were beasts of burden.
However the oxen labored, nobody ever asked
the butterflies for help.
"You don't know how tedious! She's always
seems to be buttonholing me to tell me how
horrible I am."
"She's a force for moral good," he declared.
"Just like her mother."
... he had watched her playing games with
everyone, like a bored goddess. She picked
people up, turned them around a few times for
her own amusement, and discarded them all
dizzy and bewildered.
As usual she had to avoid paying and her
dependence enraged her. Money was such a
stupid, vulgar obsession, and she didn't
deserve to be obsessed by it.
The price of sin is loneliness, she thought
to herself. You live with it quite alone.
At what age was it that you realized you were
surrounded by sycophants? As long as they
conformed, these children need never strive
for perfection, they could muddle along, being
applauded for whatever mediocre standard they
achieved, in a warm bath of falsehood.
This little, plain, somehow refined girl
intimidated him. She fought her shyness with
such brittle courage.
TH White - The Once and Future King
It is the tragedy . . . of sin coming home to
roost. That is why we have to take note of the
parentage of Arthur's son Mordred, and to
remember that the king had slept with his own
sister. He did not know he was doing so, and
perhaps it may have been due to her, but it
seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not
enough.
--p 312
[Lancelot] spent half his life torturing
himself by trying to discover what was right
so as to conquer his inclination towards what
was wrong.
--p 339
[Lancelot's quests] were an attempt to save
his honor, not establish it.
--p 340
[Lancelot] could not bear to be made to feel
that his sentiment for Guenever was an ignoble
sentiment . . . yet every circumstance now
conspired to make it seem ignoble.
--p 387
Arthur was strong enough and gentle enough to
hope that, if he trusted Lancelot and
Guenever, things would come right in the
end.
--p 389
Virginia Woolf - The Death of a Moth
The rooks too were keeping one of their
annual festivities; soaring round the tree
tops until it looked as if a vast net with
thousands of black knots in it had been cast
up into the air; which, after a few moments
sank slowly down upon the trees until every
twig seemed to have a knot at the end of
it...Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown
into the air again in a wider circle this
time, with the utmost clamor and vociferation,
as though to be thrown into the air and settle
slowly down upon the tree tops were a
tremendously exciting experience.
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be
called moths. They do not excite that pleasant
sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom
which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in
the shadow of the curtain never fails to do.
Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very
thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the
world had been thrust into his frail and
diminutive body ... he was little or nothing
but life ... It was if someone had taken a
tiny bead of pure life and decking it as
lightly as possible with down and feathers,
had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us
the true nature of life.
