Leaving a note here on ‘The Court Magician‘ by Sarah Pinsker for its choice of narrator and the tone of its prose. Brilliant and ties curiously well to the beginning of the tale.
Tag: quotes
A sort of genius
I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion’s tail hidden in his words. He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?
— The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
Sybel
She sat down on the chair beside the bed and covered her face with her hands. She whispered finally into her palms, “You told me to love him. So I did, like I have loved nothing else in my world. And now you want to take him from me, to use him in your war games. Tell me now: which of us has the heart of ice?”
— Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Sybel on the child Tamlorn.
On memories and buttons
Needles have eyes, buttons have eyes, memories have eyes, but not to see with. The eyes of memories only look one way, in their own direction, they are not accurate, and what they see changes without even the need to blink.
Such a tender utterance to replace a button, the use of tired eyes, the lateness of the
hour, the needle pricks, tiny work for work-worn fingers. My mother had beautiful hands, slender, long, delicate. Grief changes perspective on even the most mundane of things. A tear in my eye, a thread through the needle, a needle through the button, sewing on the memory.My parents are gone, but I can stack some memories in a packing box so they can be
shaken, so they might rattle, the tin opened and poured out at will and one chosen, just the right size and colour.
The intricacies of power
“Power has become so subtle and complex a thing in the ways taken by the Ekumen that only a subtle mind can watch it work; here it is still limited, still visible. In Estraven, for instance, one feels the man’s power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a word that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur. Nothing succeeds like success. I don’t trust Estraven, whose motives are forever obscure; I don’t like him; yet I feel and respond to his authority as surely as I do to the warmth of the sun.”
— Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Leguin
Circe on Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus
“Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”
“I looked at her, as vivid in my doorway as the moon in the autumn sky. Her eyes held mine, gray and steady. It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.”
“There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.”
“There was a contained quality to Telemachus, a quiet assurance that made him companionable without being intrusive. The creature he most reminded me of, I realized, was my lion. They had the same upright dignity, the same steady gaze with deep-set humor. Even the same earthbound grace, which pursued their own ends while I pursued mine.”
I finally understand what’s so beautiful about Circe and why the book is such a delight to read. It’s because as Circe walks her island, Aiaia’s groves, its forest trails and beaten paths, as she brews her potions and grinds her herbs, as she tends to her wolves and lions, we are there with her, every step of the way, sharing every moment of her exile. We feel her longing for company, her constant battle against time and agelessness– those godly afflictions that are pronounced in solitude. And we remain so intimately present as she regards her scarce visitors, sifting through them like they were sand, knowing them and understanding them…. sometimes in the present and other times in recollections. She is so far from society, yet never was a Greek Goddess ever presented in literature who was as empathetic and masterful at understanding mortals and immortals as much as Circe. Madeline Miller’s work is a beautiful and powerful read.
Circe again
“Timidity creates nothing.”
“His eyes were brown and warm as summer earth. His words were simple. They had no art to them, which of course was also art.”
“Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hit, yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling. I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
— Circe, Madeline Miller
Circe
“My father’s halls were dark and silent. His palace was a neighbor to Oceanos’, buried in the earth’s rock, and its walls were made of polished obsidian. Why not? They could have been anything in the world, blood-red marble from Egypt or balsam from Araby, my father had only to wish it so. But he liked the way the obsidian reflected his light, the way its slick surfaces caught fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone. My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.”
Circe, Madeline Miller
Art-o-Tart