Elizabeth Hand Quotes

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn’t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn’t even there.
And that was when I realized: This is what it’s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just the world turning and going on without you and you’ll never be part of it again.

I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.

Mars Hill was inspired by a real place near where I live on the coast of Maine, a 100+ year old Spiritualist community called Temple Heights: little carpenter's gothic cottages tumbling down a hillside overlooking the sea, very picturesque and, tragically, very susceptible to the terrible development pressure that's bearing down on the small towns around here. So far, however, the spiritualists seem to be winning out. After I wrote "Last Summer at Mars Hill", I visited the place formally and had a reading done by a psychic there. The place was exactly as I'd imagined it, as were its (human) inhabitants. I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas.

Truth is, often Lesley got the fuzzy end of the lollypop.

I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing … I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.

I think Washington is a magical place. I lived there for thirteen years, and until the day I left I never wanted to live anywhere else. I went back for the first time two years ago, after over a decade's absence; it was like seeing an old lover and discovering — with great relief — that the flame is still there. Gore Vidal famously remarked of walking through the city with his grandfather, a senator, and the old man telling him, "Someday all this will make marvelous ruins."

I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot. So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

Several months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I'd seen the eye. A figure appeared in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up at him, he extended his hand until his finger touched the center of my forehead. There was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears ringing. It was the morning of my seventeenth birthday

Faeries might have been wandering around in Victorian England. I can believe that. But it is a more difficult thing to think that they might be wandering around Camden Town now. It is more of a jump, but I find that more interesting in many ways. The irruption of the supernatural into our world is a much more enticing notion to explore than the same thing happening in some past time, or in a wholly imaginary world.

What a crazy place this was. Someone gets sick, and instead of dialing 911 you send for an obese old fortune-teller. The thought made her stomach churn; because of course that’s what her mother had done. Put her faith in fairy dust and crystals instead of physicians and chemo.

I'm sure one reason that so many Greek myths deal with terrifying, powerful women — Medea, Electra, the Erinyes, the Bacchae, — is that at some point in the misty past, women held a power that was terrifying — terrifying not because they were women whom men felt threatened by, but because they wielded that power in terrifying rituals that almost certainly involved human sacrifice. This would not be a popular platform on which to base a feminist agenda.

He even taught himself to play the viole de gambols, a true sign of a man with too much time on his hands.

I've always had numinous dreams, and a lot of them feature a Dionysian character I named The Boy in the Tree. He first came to me when I was seventeen: I had a dream that I was on a flat featureless plane, mist everywhere. Then there was a blinding flash of lightning, deafening thunder, and I fell to the ground. Someone reached out to touch the middle of my forehead with a finger: I opened my eyes, the mist was gone, and there he was: the boy in the tree, this beautiful demonic figure with mocking green eyes. After that he would appear in dreams, sitting up in a tree and talking to me, and I'd have this incredible wave of emotion, a feeling I've only ever had in dreams — the most amazingly intense combination of desire and loss and anticipation. Later I'd think (still dreaming) This is what I will feel when I die. And who knows? Maybe I will. Then, while researching Winterlong, I found a reference to Dionysios of Boeotia, where the god was called the One in the Tree. So even though I rationally know there's no such thing as a Dionsyian god, or a universal unconscious, it's very, very easy for me to extrapolate them both from my own dream-experience. The roots of these myths of the dying or vegetative god are so ancient and so many that one can wander among them forever, I think, yet never find a single source. And the primary material in Greece is so fascinating and so dark — The Bacchae, what we know of the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries — great stuff for writers. For me personally, of course, Dionysos embodies all the themes that have always preoccupied me: mutable sexual identity, altered states of consciousness; madness, the theater, ecstacy.

Jason just couldn’t take it. Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest.

I find that many modern fantasies explain things away far too easily, which makes a lot of it overly familiar (to me, anyway). Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.