Burial Rites Quotes

To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.

At Camp Half-Blood. The Hades cabin needs a head counsellor. Have you seen the decor? It’s disgusting. I’ll have to renovate. And someone needs to do the burial rites properly, since demigods insist on dying heroically.’ ‘That’s – that’s fantastic! Dude!’ Jason opened his arms for a hug, then froze. ‘Right. No touching. Sorry.’ Nico grunted. ‘I suppose we can make an exception.’ Jason squeezed him so hard Nico thought his ribs would crack.

I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.

It’s not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.

I was worst to the one I loved best.

Any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.

Blíndur er bóklaus ma∂ur. Blind is a man without a book.

I don't want to be remembered, I want to be here!

They see I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and believe a thinking woman cannot be trusted.

The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe.

I cannot think of what it was not to love him. To look at him and realise I had found what I had not known I was hungering for. A hunger so deep, so capable of driving me into the night, that it terrified me.

She invented her own language to say what everyone else could only feel.

They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say “Agnes” and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness.

I preferred to read than talk with the others.

She made mistakes and others made up their minds about her. People around here don’t let you forget your misdeeds. They think them the only things worth writing down.

I remain quiet. I am determined to close myself to the world, to tighten my heart and hold what has not yet been stolen from me. I cannot let myself slip away. I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt.

Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own.

God has had His chance to free me, and for reasons known to Him alone, He has pinned me to ill fortune, and although I have struggled, I am run through and through with disaster; I am knifed to the hilt with fate.

It was not hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margret thought.As it says in the sagas, Opt er flago i fogru skinni. A witch often has fair skin.

They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.

I prefer a story to a prayer.

I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them.

Sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me.

He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide.

What else is God good for other than a distraction from the mire we’re all stranded in?

It was only later that I suffocated under the weight of his arguments, and his darker thoughts articulated. It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.

Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there...

No matter if you tried to do what was best. No matter if your innermost self whispers, ‘I am not as you say!’—how other people think of you determines who you are.

No doves come from ravens’ eggs

Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

Good Lord," he muttered "They pick a mouse to tame a cat.

Άνθρωπος χωρίς βιβλίο, τυφλός.

The only thing I could think of was, if you move, you will crumble. If you breathe, you will collapse.

I can picture the way he looked, and recall the weather, and the play of light across his stubbled face, but that virgin moment is impossible to recapture.

The weight of his fingers on mine, like a bird landing on a branch. It was the drop of a match. I did not see that we were surrounded by tinder until I felt it burst into flames.

Θα χαθείς. Δεν υπάρχει τελευταία κατοικία, δεν υπάρχει κηδεία, δεν υπάρχει ταφή, μόνο ένα ασταμάτητο σκόρπισμα, ένα ταξίδι που σπάει σε χίλια άλλα άσκοπα, ένα ταξίδι που σε πάει παντού χωρίς να σου προσφέρει δρόμο για να γυρίσεις στο σπίτι, αφού δεν υπάρχει σπίτι, υπάρχει μόνο αυτό το κρύο νησί και ο σκοτεινός εαυτός σου ίσα που κρατιέται πάνω του, ώσπου ν' αρχίσεις κι εσύ να ουρλιάζεις σαν τον αέρα και να μιμείσαι τη μοναξιά του

He lay back down on the snow. “What’s the name for the space between stars?” “No such name.” “Make one up.” I thought about it. “The soul asylum.

For the first time in my life, someone saw me, and I loved him because he made me feel I was enough.

The last bed, the last roof, the last floor. The last of everything brings lugs of pain, as though there will be nothing left, but smoke from fires abandoned.

When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?

Those who are not being dragged to their deaths cannot understand how the heart grows hard and sharp, until it is a nest of rocks with only an empty egg in it.

Poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.

Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.

Up in the highlands blizzards howl like the widows of fishermen and the wind blisters the skin off your face. Winter comes like a punch in the dark. The uninhabited places are as cruel as any executioner.

The shore is of pebbles, and huge tangles of seaweed float in the bay and look like the hair of the drowned.

we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant,

Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.

If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I’d be a sight more miserable than I am now

...dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.

In those early visits it was as though we were building something sacred. We'd place words carefully together, piling them upon one another, leaving no spaces. We each created towers, two beacons, the like of which are built along roads to guide the way when the weather comes down. We saw one another through the fog, the suffocating repetition of life.

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.

Never be caught staring at someone. They'll think you want something from them.

A bubble of fear passes up my spine. It's the feeling of standing on ice and suddenly hearing it crack under your weight - both thrilling and terrifying together.

And though the snow smothered the valley and the milk froze in the dairy, my soul thawed.

I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow.

It is the waiting that cripples.

She is not like me. She knows only the tree of life. She has not seen its twisted roots pawing stones and coffins.

I could flee to the heath. Show them that they cannot keep me locked up, that I am a thief of time and will steal the hours denied to me!

She doesn’t look like a criminal, he thought. Not since she’s had a bath.

He had a lot of enemies. But whether those folks were wronged or just jealous is hard to say. Stories have a way of boiling over

The priest ...told me that I would burn if I did not cast my mind back over the sin of my life and pray for forgiveness. As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.

What’s the name for the space between stars?” “No such name.” “Make one up.” I thought about it. “The soul asylum.” “That's another way of saying heaven, Agnes.

Είναι ένα ψέμα. Τον Θεό τον έχουν πλάσει οι άνθρωποι από τον φόβο του θανάτου.

folks say, for every mountain there is a valley.

I try to love God, Reverend. I do. But I cannot love these men. I... I hate them.

Agnes: "I have a question for you, speaking of truth. You say God speaks the truth." Tóti: "Yes." Agnes: "And God said: 'Thou shalt not kill.' Tóti: "Yes. Tóti said carefully." Agnes: "Then Blondal and the rest are going against God. They're hypocrites. They say they are carrying out God's law but they are only doing the will of men.

Heavenly Father, forgive me my sins. Forgive me my weakness and fear. Help me to fight my cowardice. Strengthen my ability to withstand the sight of suffering, so that I might do Your work in relieving those who endure it. -Toti

I so often feel that I am barely here, that to feel weight is to be reminded of my own existence. Margrét and I work in

Natan Ketilsson fetched his wife from heaven’s gate.

winter is coming.

He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide. Knew me like the smell of smoke, knew what I was, and what I wanted.

The weight of his fingers on mine, like a bird landing on a branch.

A tight fear, like a fishing line, hooked upon something that must, inevitably, be dragged from the depths. (Margret)

There are times when I wonder whether I’m not already dead. This is no life; waiting in darkness, in silence, in a room so squalid I have forgotten the smell of fresh air. The

It's a lie. Man has created God out of fear of dying.

I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt. The poems composed as I washed and scythed and cooked until my hands were raw. The sagas I know by heart. I am sinking all I have left and going underwater. If I speak, it will be in bubbles of air. They will not be able to keep my words for themselves. They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.

I might have starved to death. I would be mud-slick, stuffed to the guts with cold and hopelessness, and my body might know it was doomed and give up on its own. That would be better than idly winding wool on a snowy day, waiting for someone to kill me.

Illugastadir, the farm by the sea, where the soft air rings with the clang of the smithy, and gulls caw, and seals roll over in their fat. Illugastadir, where the night is lit by fire, where smoke turns in the early morning to engulf the stars, and in ruins, always Illugastadir, cradling dead bodies in its cage of burnt beams.

I imagine, then, that we are all candle flames, greasy-bright, fluttering in the darkness and the howl of the wind, and in the stillness of the room I hear footsteps, awful coming footsteps, coming to blow me out and send my life up away from me in a grey wreath of smoke. I will vanish into the air and the night. They will blow us all out, one by one, until it is only their own light by which they see themselves.

I could have been a pauper; I could have been their servant, until those words! They anchor me to a memory that snatches the breath out of me. They are the magic words, the curse that turns me into a monster, and now I am Agnes of Illugastadir, Agnes of the fire, Agnes of the dead bodies with the blood, not burnt, still clinging to the clothes I made for him.

He turned his head, ice crystals caught in his hair. “Agnes. Don’t pretend you disagree. This is all there is and you know it. Life, here, in our veins. There is the snow, and the sky, and the stars and the things they tell us, and that’s all. Everyone else—they’re blind. They don’t know if they’re living or dead.

Sometimes, people never stood a chance in the beginning. Or they might have made a mistake. When people start saying things like she must be a bad mother because of that mistake." .... "It's not fair. People claim to know you through the things you've done and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.

How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief moment as they led me out of doors. I fell, my skirts in the mud, and I turned my face upwards as if in prayer. I could have wept from the relief of light.

Dia telah menderaku dengan nasib sial, dan walaupun aku telah berjuang, aku dihantam dan terus dihantam dengan malapetaka; aku ditikam sampai ke hulu oleh nasib

The next morning I woke, and for a few moments I didn’t know where I was. Then my memory of the night came back to me, and anger tightened my stomach, invigorating me.

But I needed to create a life of my own. And here I

Rósa’s poetry kindled the shavings of my soul, and lit me up from within.

If I had known that the dress I laboured over would be my only warmth in a room that reeked of sour skin. If I had known that the dress would one day be put on in the night, in a hurry, to be soaked with sweat as I ran through the witching hours to Stapar, screaming fit to raise the dead.

I did not dream in the storeroom at Stóra-Borg. While I curled up on the wooden slats with a moldy horse-skin for warmth, sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me.

Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there, licking the grass flat upon the ground, not caring whether the soil is at a freeze or thaw, for it will freeze and thaw again, and soon your bones, now hot with blood and thick-juicy with marrow, will be dry and brittle and flake and freeze and thaw with the weight of the dirt upon you, and the last moisture of your body will be drawn up to the surface by the grass, and the wind will come and knock it down and push you back against the rocks, or it will scrape you up under its nails and take you out to sea in a wild screaming of snow.

This is my only wish to you, bound in anger and grief: Do not scratch my bleeding wounds, I’m full of disbelief. My soul is filled with sorrow! I seek grace from the Lord. Remember, Jesus bought us both and for the same accord.

I have come upon the conviction that it is not the stern voice of a priest delivering the threat of brimstone, but the gentle and inquiring tones of a friend that will best draw back the curtain to her soul, District Commissioner.

I have made a mistake. They condemn me to death and I ask for a boy to coach me for it. A red-headed boy, who gobbles his buttered bread and toddles to his horse with the seat of his pants wet, this is the young man they hope will get me on my knees, full of prayer. This is the young man I hope will be able to help me, although with what and how I cannot think.

Together they listed the people they had known who had died on the mountains. A bleak conversation to have, thought Margrét, but there was some comfort in talking about death aloud, as though in naming things, you could prevent them from happening.

Lauga had asked Margret whether she thought there would be an outward hint of the evil that drives a person to murder. Evidence oft he Devil: a herelip, a snaggletooth, a birthmark; some small outer defect. There must be a warning, some way of knowing, so that honest people could keep their guard.

Perhaps it is a shame that I have vowed to keep my past locked up within me. At Hvammur, during the trial, they plucked at my words like birds. Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush. They did not let me say what happened in my own way, but took my memories of Illugastadir, of Natan, and wrought them into something sinister; they wrested my statement of that night and made me seem malevolent. Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own

I dreamt of the execution block last night. I dreamt I was alone and crawling through the snow towards the dark stump. My hands and knees were numb from the ice, but I had no choice. When I came upon the block, its surface was vast and smooth. I could smell the wood. It had none of the saltiness of driftwood, but was like bleeding sap, like blood. Sweeter, heavier. In my dream I dragged myself up and held my head above it. It began to snow, and I thought to myself: "This is the silence before the drop." And then I wondered at the stump being there, the tree it might have been, when trees do not grow here. There is too much silence, I thought in my dream. Too many stones. So I addressed the wood out loud. I said: "I will water you as though you still lived." And at this last word I woke.