Mary Newbury Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“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.”