#memory of fire

[hyperions-fate]

The First Father conjured the world to birth with the tip of his wand and covered it with down. Out of the down rose the cedar, the sacred tree from which flows the word. Then the First Father told the Mby'a-guaranís to hollow out the trunk and listen to what it had in it. He said that whoever could listen to the cedar, the casket of words, would know where to establish his hearth. Whoever couldn't would return to despised dust.

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Genesis (1982)

[hello-robin-goodfellow]

They are two by an error that  the night corrects.

Eduardo Galeano, Faces and Masks (Memory of Fire #2).

[random-bookquotes]

But being an adult did not mean eliminating sudden magic from one’s life. It meant taking reasoned risks, using fail-safes where possible, thinking things through before jumping to find the best way to jump. It did not mean avoiding risk altogether—that was the definition for being dead.

Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire

[ariel-seagull-wings]

IF YOU LOSE YOUR SOUL CARELESSLY

What is that Huichol Indian woman doing who is about to give birth? She remembers. She intensely remembers the night of love from which the child to be born comes. She thinks about it with all the strength of her memory and her joy. Thus the body opens, happy with the happiness it had, and then the good Huichol is born, who will be worthy of the joy that made him. A good Huichol takes care of his soul, his luminous life force, but it is well known that the soul is smaller than an ant and softer than a whisper, a thing of nothing, a little breeze, and in any carelessness it can be lost. A boy stumbles and rolls down the mountain, and his soul breaks free and falls into the rut, bound as it was only by spider silk thread. Then the young Huichol becomes stunned, falls ill. Stammering, he calls for the guardian of the sacred songs, the witch doctor priest. What is that old Indian searching for, digging in the mountains? He follows the trail where the sick man had walked. He climbs, very silently, among the sharp rocks, exploring the branches, leaf by leaf, and under the pebbles. Where did life fall? Where was it frightened? He walks slowly and with his ears wide open, because lost souls cry and sometimes whistle like a breeze. When he finds the wandering soul, the witch-priest lifts it on the tip of a feather, wraps it in a tiny cotton ball, and carries it back to its owner inside a hollow reed, who will not die. (Eduardo Galeano - Memory of Fire II. Faces and Masks)

[baroquespiral]

The steps of the temple are stained with blood, and skulls accumulate in the centre of the plaza. Not only so that the sun should move, no; also so that that secret god should decide instead of man. In homage to that god, across the sea inquisitors fry heretics on bonfires or twist them in the torture chambers. It is the God of Fear. The God of Fear, who has rat's teeth and vulture's wings.

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire Vol. 1: Genesis

[random-bookquotes]

I must, after all, maintain a certain appearance of power in order to maintain the fact of power.

Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire

[random-bookquotes]

“We know of science. It is the simplicity of mass and weight, of action and reaction. It is logic, and things that can be measured, and things that can be seen, and it gives results that anyone who follows directions well can repeat.”

Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire

[random-bookquotes]

Crossbreeds are chains that tie together two universes that aren’t meant to be chained. Their simple existence brings devastation to both the worlds that gave them life—not through any malice or evil intent on their parts—just because they were never meant to live.

Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire