Celia Rees Quotes

“Those that can heal can harm; those that can cure can kill.”

“Daughter of the Erl King and the Elfen Queen, that’s who you are.”

“I looked into her eyes, and saw my own staring back, the same peculiar shade, pale grey, flecked with yellow, rimmed with black. Now I knew the nature of her debt. It had weighed on her conscience for fourteen years. I was looking into the eyes of mother and I knew that I would never see her again.”

“I am Mary. I am a witch. Or so some would call me. ‘Spawn of the Devil,’ ‘Witch child,’ they hiss in the street, although I know neither father nor mother. I know only my grandmother, Eliza Nuttall; Mother Nuttall to her neighbors. She brought me up from a baby. If she knew who my parents are, she never told me.”

“In the town live witches nine: three in worsted, three in rags, and three in velvet fine...”

“Lies are not rooted in the mind in the way truth is.”

“It is no good wishing for what was not to be.”

“I owe a great debt to Eliza Nuttall, the woman you call Grandmother. She was my nurse.”

“She was all that I knew, all that was dear. I’d loved her and she’d loved me. Now I was alone in the world. How would I do without her? My thoughts echoed the landlady: What would become of me?”

“I should flee, get away. They will turn on me next unless I go. But where to? What am I to do? Lose myself. Die in the forest. I look around. Eyes, hard with hatred, slide from mine. Mouths twitch between leering and sneering. I will not run away into the forest, because that is what they want me to do.”

“Colored lights shone right across the northern sky, leaping and flaring, spreading in rainbow hues from horizon to zenith: blood red to rose pink, saffron yellow to delicate primrose, pale green, aquamarine to darkest indigo. Great veils of color swathed the heavens, rising and falling as light seen through cascading curtains of water. Streamers shot out in great shifting beams as if God had put his thumb across the sun.”