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Quote by Selby Wynn Schwartz

“Nightmares are the visits of what has come before you undead. They claw into the seam that should sew up your life. They hiss the ancient fates that will have undone you in your very bed, how you could not move while the whole city was falling around you in blood and firelight. The entrails of birds will lie on the stones of your dreams, making signs.”

Quote by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Work

After Sappho

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Selby Wynn Schwartz

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“الرؤى التي نطرحها على أطفالنا تسهم في تشكيل المستقبل، ومن المهم بالنسبة للمستقبل ما تكون عليه هذه الرؤى. فكثيرا ما تصبح الرؤى نبواءات بالتحقيق الذاتي للمرام. إن الأحلام خرائط.”

“Courage as you define it is to write the story of your heart, the story that formed while your life came as a mixture of agony and amazement. Courage as you define it is to feel your unfelt self and let the feelings be penned down so it maybe someone's else's survival guide when they have lost their own. Courage as you define it is to keep believing for there are still some unfinished poems in this world. Courage as you define it is to keep walking for there are still some unwritten stories you need to pen before you surrender to the end.....”

“Dreams All night the dark buds of dreams open richly. In the center of every petal is a letter, and you imagine if you could only remember and string them all together they would spell the answer. It is a long night, and not an easy one — you have so many branches, and there are diversions — birds that come and go, the black fox that lies down to sleep beneath you, the moon staring with her bone-white eye. Finally you have spent all the energy you can and you drag from the ground the muddy skirt of your roots and leap awake with two or three syllables like water in your mouth and a sense of loss — a memory not yet of a word, certainly not yet the answer — only how it feels when deep in the tree all the locks click open, and the fire surges through the wood, and the blossoms blossom.”

“Even knowing the danger, and remembering Ella's warnings, that single conjured spark had been enough to draw her back. The fire held her, trancelike, and was drawing her in. She was a single thread; the fabric of her being was a many-textured, spectrum-colored tapestry, unravelling a fiber at a time, unwinding on to a vast spool held by hands within the fire, one fine strand carefully wound in after another. As if that is where it starts, at the eyes, where the threads of the soul hang in their slackest stitch; stitches which can be hooked free of weft and warp, and pulled through, drawn out, spooled in. She was lost to it. She was coming apart. She knew the danger. The idea of resistance fashioned itself into a sword in her mind, a bright-edged sword, a way out. But the sword itself became smoke; and the thing she would slash free of became smoke. The effort to resist required too much, too mighty a cut, too great a mental stroke. Her mind was coming apart. Honora belonged to the fire. She was enslaved by the ritual dance of the aromatic flame. Fire, first and most martial of all elements, the hierarchical prince. She saw in the fire the tapered banners of his glorious armies, the swallowtail, pennants a-flutter, flags of crimson, ochre, sapphire, armies spilling into valleys and camped along the plains. They pinioned her and they held her. The flame engaged with her. She was fire. She was smoke. She was coming apart, like smoke.”