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She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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I wanted us to have a holiday, not a ruddy breakdown.
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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That man’s gaga,” said Roger when they were out of hearing. “He’s so far gone he’s coming back.
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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Lleu is a hard lord,” said Huw, “He is killing Gronw without anger, without love, without mercy. He is hurt too much by the woman and the spear. Yet what is there when it is done? His pride. No spear. No friend.”
Roger started at Huw. “You’re not so green as you’re grass-looking, are you?” he said. “Now you mention it, I have been thinking— That bloke Gronw was the only one with any real guts at the end.”
“But none of them is all to blame,” said Huw. “It is only together they are destroying each other.”
“That Blod-woman was pretty poor,” said Roger, “however you look at it.”
“No,” said Huw. “She was made for her lord. Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she was longing for the time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns.
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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The more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have “invented” an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.
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Alan Garner (Alan Garner Classic Collection (7 Books) - Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, Elidor, Red Shift, Lad of the Gad, A Bag of Moonshine))
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The wood lay still. The air throbbed with insects, and flies hovered and disappeared and hovered. Meadowsweet grew in a mist of flowers, and the sun glinted on the threads of caterpillars which hung from the trees as thick as rain. “By,” said Gwyn, “there’s axiomatic.
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Alan Garner (Alan Garner Classic Collection (7 Books) - Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, Elidor, Red Shift, Lad of the Gad, A Bag of Moonshine))
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The walls were shedding their texture and taking another in the pouncing feathers. Gwyn
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Alan Garner (Alan Garner Classic Collection (7 Books) - Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, Elidor, Red Shift, Lad of the Gad, A Bag of Moonshine))
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What do I know?' said Huw, and Gwyn was frightened by the fear in Huw's eyes. 'What do I know?... I know more than I know... I don't know what I know... The weight, the weight of it!
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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She was tall. Her long hair fell to her waist, framing in gold her pale and lovely face. Her eyes were blue. She wore a loose gown of white cambric, embroidered with living green stems of broom and meadowsweet, and a wreath of green oak leaves in here hair.
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Alan Garner (The Owl Service)
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Martin Chorley’s utilitarian office turned out to be less interesting than his study. He had every OS Map of the British Isle ever published, going all the way back to the nineteenth century, plus a range of specialist maps and gazettes—some of which I recognized from my post-Herefordshire research. A couple of Edwardian earthwork surveys, the Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins and The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages which confirmed that Martin Chorley was an enormous Tolkien nerd. As if the five or six different editions of The Lord of the Rings and the signed first edition of The Hobbit wasn’t enough proof. He hadn’t neglected the other Inklings, though—C.S. Lewis had a shelf. And he didn’t have any objection to YA either, judging by the collection of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, again first editions, but these ones far too well read to be worth much, beside similarly worn copies of The Owl Service and the rest of Alan Garner’s books.
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Ben Aaronovitch (The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London, #6))
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The Books Lucia’s birthday gifts for September 1st: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie 2nd: Burglar Bill by Janet and Allan Ahlberg 3rd: Dogger by Shirley Hughes 4th: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll 5th: Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter 6th: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 7th: The Borrowers by Mary Norton 8th: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett 9th: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell 10th: Matilda by Roald Dahl 11th: Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott 12th: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 13th: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 14th: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman 15th: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters 16th: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen 17th: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson 18th: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 19th: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 20th: Passing by Nella Larsen 21st: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 22nd: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 23rd: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell 24th: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie 25th: The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes 26th: Atonement by Ian McEwan 27th: Small Island by Andrea Levy 28th: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 29th: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson 30th: Harvest by Jim Crace 31st: A Secret Garden by Katie Fforde 32nd: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel From Lucia’s life Bird at My Window by Rosa Guy Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle The Owl Service by Alan Garner The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault Story of O by Pauline Réage Illustrated Peter Pan by Arthur Rackham Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie Marina’s recommendation Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder The book club at September’s house The Color Purple by Alice Walker Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Silas Marner by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss also mentioned) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The book club’s birthday books for September’s 34th birthday Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Stephanie Butland (The Book of Kindness)