Here are some quotes from The Dark Weaver that I've thought to be particularly good. I'm more than halfway through now, and will probably finish up today...I'm a quote fiend, hoarding them like a squirrel saving nuts for winter. Hey, you never know when you'll need them, right?
"Perhaps the majesty of a human soul can only be measured by its conquest of sorrows and tribulations" (Salverson 171).
"For this erstwhile charwoman incurable gossip and sly schemer showed a grasp of foreign affairs, of statecraft and political history, as astonishing as it was dangerous to the sanctities of tyranny. Certainly such enlightenment boded an eventual ill day of reckoning for those in any country who tirelessly sought to suppress, and hounded and forced into exile thousands like her. Poor blind fools! Tin gods by happy accident, they had foolishly forgotten who raised them up, fed and feted them and made sacred tradition of their pitiful vanities. In their stupidity of manufactured pride they had forgotten that the people who shouted hail! hail! as they drove by their stinking hovels had created them, and might as quickly unmake them. For the final victory is never really to the strong, who sit in the sun for a day or a century. But to the timeless people whose changing ideals priests and potentates typify, uphold for a brief while, then degrade, dishonour and betray. Victory, and dominion over the earth, are to the people, who create all things, suffer and survive all things, and, at long last like the locust, swarm in God's wrath to devour their oppressors" (Salverson 253)!
"The real trouble with human judgement is it invariably falls after the event. Often enough what seems dire tragedy, if left to the balancing laws of the spiritual universe, turns out to be a genuine blessing, or at least of vast benefit to the progress of the individual or the race" (Salverson 271).
This book is really good in an epic sort of way, reminding me slightly of Gone With the Wind(though that book was FABULOUS, and I'm not as fond of this one, how could anything replace GWTW!) combined with Giants in the Earth (which I never finished, but liked while I was reading it)...sometimes the prose is rather dragging, but the characters are just romantic/dramatic enough to keep it interesting...She makes time pass so quickly however, I can't always figure out exactly how much time has gone by...God is Salverson's Dark Weaver, a much more omnipresent and damning figure than just time itself(her God reminds me more of an Old Testament God, not necessarily very uplifting or forgiving), but we'll see. Perhaps the book will end without everyone being miserable in dead-end lives...I do so love happy or at least possibly happy endings...:)