Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Hanleigh Bradley

Quote by Hanleigh Bradley

Work

Cursed By The Crown

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Hanleigh Bradley

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Hanleigh Bradley. more

You May Also Like

“There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, "You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!" And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat's cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.”

“Once upon a time,' I whispered, "there was a girl who got away.' The light burned a little less brightly through my lids. Maybe. 'Once upon a time there was a girl who changed her fate,' I said, louder. The words ran together like beads on a string. Like a story, or a bridge I could climb-- up, up, up, like a nursery-rhyme spider. 'She grew up like a fugitive, because her life belonged to another place." I held my fingertips out, feeling the ice of them melt the wall's fine, hot fizzing. 'She remembered her real mother, far away on an Earth made of particles and elements and /reason/. Not stories. And she ripped a hole in the world so she could find her way home. And she lived happily ever after in a place far, far from the Hinterland,' I said. I begged. 'And the freeze left her skin. And she found her real mother in the world where she had left her.' Slowly, slowly, I opened my eyes.”