In the gray Quotes

“She could not have been born gray. Hercolor, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixednature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.”

“They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths todream of, rose-marble-fingeredWomen shed light down the great lines;But you have invoked the slime in the skull,The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Godslike racial dreams, the woman's desire,The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothingHuman seems happy at the feet of yours.Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in the gray oldyears in the evening leaningOver the gray stones of the tower-top,You shall be called heartless and blind.”

“White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens. A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ("The North")”

“When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.”

“After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. In the night, the stars convened, and the vast ghost of Machhapuchare radiated light, although there was no moon.”

“You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.”

“Wawashkeshthese apples arefor you,red on the whitesnow,their cider tangwill find youin the gray woods.There is a storyhow a snakeoffered an apple,so sweet, so cold,those bite wassorrow.--excerpt from Eric Gadzinski's poem "Wawashkeshgiwis" from The Way North”

“In the gray world above, I hear myself howling with laughter. Far below me, in the psychic abyss that is part of the Darkness, I hear another howling, one full of joy and pain, rage and celebration.Not just another witch is coming, my foolish Sisters, but Witch.”

“The old folks say there is only black and white. That may do for their tidy lives, but it doesn’t apply to all of us. We, Supergirls for real and the wretched creature at my feet, live in the gray and the mist. We may never see the stars, but we believe in the dream of them.”