“Now, if you sit perfectly silent for a long time and look at the sea, or the sky, or the running water of a river, something happens to you – a sort of magic. Not the violent magic that makes the kind of adventures that I have been telling you about, but a kind of gentle but very strong inside magic, that makes things clear, and shows you what things are important, and what are not.”
“It was days like this, she decided, looking down at the rain-swept street, black days with a black sky and a heaviness in the air, that revealed things about Jane Hoyt—that Jane Hoyt didn’t like. The specifications called for a Jane Hoyt who was more or less one-dimensional, alert, well-educated major in English literature, matter of fact, sense of humor, American society pigeonhole number sixteen, which was located a little below the junior league pigeonhole and a little above the shopgirl pigeonhole… There was no allowance in the pattern for healthy girls, regardless of pigeonhole, who still had a renegade ghost of savage underlying their well-groomed exterior.”
“She’d be top in whatever she did or die in the attempt.”
“‘Do you remember my father’s aviary in Hampshire?’ she said, ‘and how the birds there were well fed, and could fly about their cage? And one day I set a linnet free, and it flew straight out of my hands towards the sun?’
“‘What of it?’ he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
“‘Because I feel like that. Like the linnet before it flew…'”
“Yes, it is inevitable now that we must ask. And we may yet learn much. Though we may find, when we have our answers, that we were better off as we are now, with only our questions. Our ideas of the world are about to change, Mr. Pensette, and not by a little. You should not think this will be an agreeable experience.”
– Subadar Priddish, A Passage to Shambala: The Explorer’s Guild Vol. I, by John Baird and Kevin Costner, illustrated by Rick Ross
Continue reading “A Passage to Shambala: the Explorer’s Guild, Volume 1”
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