Spilled Ink

And every day she searches the sea and the sky, the castle and the courtyard, the keep and the king’s face, for something she cannot always remember. What is it, what is it that she is seeking in this strange place? She knew a moment ago, but she has forgotten.

‘Hi,’ said Prince Lir. ‘Glad to meet you.’ His smile wriggled at their feet like a hopeful puppy, but his eyes—a deep shadowy blue behind stubby lashes—rested quietly on the eyes of the Lady Amalthea. She looked back at him, silent as a jewel, seeing him no more truly than men see unicorns. But the prince felt strangely, happily certain that she had looked him round and through, and down into caverns that he had never known were there, where her glance echoed and sang. Prodigies began to waken somewhere southwest of his twelfth rib, and he himself—still mirroring the Lady Amalthea—began to shine.

Disdaining shielding shadow, it gleamed in full sunshine, obvious as a tree—or as a Human, who thinks his own kind kings of the world.

‘Well, he’s fickle, careless, selfish, and hysterical,’ she said. ‘Half the time I think he doesn’t care what happens to anyone as long as he’s all right—but then I find out how awfully kind he’s been to someone. Then I think he’s kind just when it suits him—only then I find out he undercharges poor people. I don’t know, Your Majesty. He’s a mess.’

Our failures are our stories. … I say tell them good, tell them sparingly, but tell them.

Getting into Mrs. Fairfax’s conversation was rather like getting into a skipping rope. You had to choose the right moment. But once you were in, you were in.

Witty and mean is easy - but fond and funny is hard.

Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility.

I am a part of everything that I have read.