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Nymph Quotes

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Nymph Quotes

“Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.”

EvilMagicDevilGoodNonsenseWitchPracticalityNymph
Book:The Everlasting Man
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“Above, a vivid painting hung over the fireplace. Inside its frame, a woman was transforming into a tree. The lower half of her body was bark and roots, plunging into soil, while her waist and chest arched upwards and her outstretched hands reached for the sky. The nymph's dark hair was a knotted mass of branches around her head, sprouting bright green leaves. It was the myth of Daphne---the nymph who begged the river god to save her from Apollo and was turned into a laurel tree. "It must be a terrible thing to lose," Hawthorne said, making her jump. He looked up from where he crouched near the fire: to the woman in the frame. His left forearm was streaked with black ash. "What's a terrible thing to lose?" Hawthorne's eyes glittered as he studied the nymph. "Your humanity." "But it was her choice," said Emeline, feeling defensive of Daphne. If the river god hadn't turned her into a laurel, she would have fallen prey to Apollo. "She asked to be saved." Firelight flickered over Hawthorne's face as his gray-eyed gaze caught hers and held it. "Saved," he murmured, considering this. "Is that really what the river god did? As a tree, her life is forfeit. She'll never be human again. She'll never laugh or sing, ponder or love, again. Don't you think she would have preferred the river god defeat Apollo, or at the very least warn him away, instead of taking something so precious from her?”

TreeMythologyApolloLaurelDaphneNymphPrice To Pay
Book:Edgewood
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“The nymph who laments, guardian of our spring of tears, Dares come only within the compass of praising, of song, - She who watches over the settling of the precipitate, That it be clear, on that same rock That bears the gates and the altars. - See, about her shoulders so tranquil there rises The sensation that she must be the youngest Of those sisters, to be disposed so. Exultation knows, and fierce Desire acknowledges, - Only Lamentation must still learn; with a maiden’s hand She counts out the old sorrows through the night. But suddenly, slantwise and unpractised, She holds aloft a constellation of our voices Against the heavens, left unobscured by her breath.”

MourningDivinityDoorOrpheusNymphDivine Sorrow
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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