Quotes from The Vintner's Luck

“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I'd supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.'
'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?'
'Yes.'
'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Why do you come here?"
"I promised."
"I release you from your promise!"
"It wasn't you I promised," the angel said quietly.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Do you no longer believe in your luck?'
'You're not my luck, fallen angel, or even my dearest friend. You're my love. My true love.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“So, did you need to hear that? Did you really need to know more?' Xas asked.
'Yes. It's always better to know more.'
'God help you,' Xas said with feeling.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“I know that you're a virgin and as bodiless as any paralytic. I know I'm old and not as handsome as I once was. But I know you love me as I love you.'
And he kissed the angel.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“And what of those losses that seem unbearable? Separations from people we feel we can't live without?'
'Perhaps our ruin honours the strength of our love.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“I knew I was in danger from the moment I proposed visiting you a second time. I knew because God warned me by sending the whirlwind that pulled a few feathers.'
'But you still came every year.'
'God is my maker but not my master. And I don't think he was saying “Thou shalt not”, rather, “I think you're going to regret this..”'
'So, you go freely, with hints. If God made a suggestion to me I'm sure I'd take it. I mean, I assume He has, but I've misunderstood.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“He said, ‘Don’t mind what happened to me. Don’t be angry. I’m a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Xas was whiteskinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel's neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was worked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a darkhaired girl who has never suckled a child.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Xas reappeared and showed every sign of winding himself around Sobran permanently, like -Sobran complained - some parasitic vine.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“The angel took a deep breath then huffed out hard through his nose, like an impatient parade horse.
"I returned because it pleased me to promise you, and to keep my promise. I returned to see what happened about your love troubles. That first night, the night we met, I'd only stopped here to rest. The rose bush I carried was heavy. Or, to be exact, its damp roots were. It was of no great height and pruned back to dead wood, little more than a bag of roots in soil. I dropped it when I caught you – when you fainted. And I lost it. But the year it rained and I went down to your house I saw that someone had found and planted it. The pink rose I carried from Denmark and was transporting to my garden.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“I don't know what God intends, or what qualifies Him to forgive me,' Sobran said”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity.
Impossible.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Every day time stopped and Sobran saw Xas, the sun reflecting off his raised wings, white chest watermarked by tears dried in fine dust; bare skin and colourless nipples, as innocent as a child's; the double signature, seagreen and vermilion, awake and vivid; a whitelipped white face and eyes, abysmal, inimical, like the sea seen through holes in an icefield. It was like being in love, this remembering, because Sobran couldn't put Xas out of his mind. And it was like shame. Because he grew so tired defending himself from the pain of this one recollection, Sobran forgot everything else he knew about the angel.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

“Xas put his face close to Sobran's and said, soft and succinct, "Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: 'Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.' So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.”
― Elizabeth Knox, quote from The Vintner's Luck

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“When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.

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― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates

“With the world securely in order, Dain was able to devote the leisurely bath time to editing his mental dictionary. He removed his wife from the general category labeled "Females" and gave her a section of her own. He made a note that she didn't find him revolting, and proposed several explanations: (a) bad eyesight and faulty hearing, (b)a defect in a portion of her otherwise sound intellect, (c) an inherited Trent eccentricity, or (d) an act of God. Since the Almighty had not done him a single act of kindness in at least twenty-five years, Dain thought it was about bloody time, but he thanked his Heavenly Father all the same, and promised to be as good as he was capable of being.”
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