Ford Pines Quotes

The Fire When a human is asked about a particular fire, she comes close: then it is too hot, so she turns her face— and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears, always on the other side of the fire. The fire she’s been asked to tell the story of, she has to turn from it, so the story you hear is that of pines and twitching leaves and how her body is like neither— all the while there is a fire at her back which she feels in fine detail, as if the flame were a dremel and her back its etching glass. You will not know all about the fire simply because you asked. When she speaks of the forest this is what she is teaching you, you who thought you were her master.

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont Majour - not so much as to Carcassonne itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye. I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return - towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crow-stepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.

Summer stepped off the stuffy bus, at once struck by the smog-free air and towering pine trees of the northern Idaho town.

My pattern has been stitched by women, I fancy even more than by men. There were the girls at the village beyond the pine wood, then Perimede who called herself my mother then Hera of the Ford, then dear sweet Hypsipyle, and then Medea. . . . Do I forget the two daughters of Pelias? One with the slashed face, the other with the hanging breast . . . No, those two did not mean much to me, not even as much as that little washed-out fool Glauce, Creon’s brat, for whom I gave my dear sons and my life before all was over.