Burial Rites

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

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.

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 was worst to the one I loved best.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 preferred to read than talk with the others.

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.

I prefer a story to a prayer.

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

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

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.

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 doves come from ravens’ eggs

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