Charles de Lint kanadai

Thomas wasn’t sure he cared for the idea—neither becoming feed for the canyon’s carrion eaters, nor being buried in the ground, as were the Catholic members of the tribe. He thought he’d prefer a Viking funeral, his last remains disappearing into ash and smoke.

This is where the Europeans got their ideas about their Faerieland, only it’s all the same place. Puck’s just Coyote in a different guise. Oberon and Titania are our elder thunders. Their gnomes and hobs are our prickly pear boys and crows.

The trouble with doing nothing is you never know when you’re finished.

Reading’s another way to go somewhere else and keep the past at bay.

According to the Rom, there were four natsiyi or tribes of Gypsies. They were, in order of importance: the Machwaya, or people of Machwa; the Lowara or Horsedealers who were primarily from Hungary or England; the Kalderash or Coppersmiths who claimed most of continental Europe and were the first to go perdal l paya, beyond the waters, to America; and the Churara or Kuneshti who were the Knife-makers. This didn’t include sedentary tribes such as the Gitanos who lived in Spain, or the Sinti of the Low Countries. In Rom myth, the Lowara were symbolized by the moon, while the Kalderash, by their very numbers, were the stars.

The urme were faeries or evil spirits that the Rom believed decided the fates of men.

“The world’s a pretty simple place. We’re the ones that make it so complicated.”

„Whiskey Jack,” she said.
He had as many names as he had shapes, but that was how he had named himself to her the last time she'd met him. It was a corruption of the Anishnabeg word wee-sa-kay-jac and meant Bitter Spirit. The time before that he'd called himself the Hodja—that was in Turkey. She'd known him as a small spiderman in Africa, a round-faced Robin Goodfellow in a Sussex forest, a raven-headed woman in Oregon. Trickster had a thousand and one shapes and names.

“He’s not a werewolf,” I tell Jonathan. “He’s a shapechanger.”
“And the difference is?”
“He can choose what he wants to be, when he wants to be. And he doesn’t have to go around chewing things up during the full moon.”

John was a brilliant musician—especially when performing the folk music of his native Hungary. Or at least Tom assumed he was of Hungarian descent. John had never said where he was from and now that Tom thought of it, there was a darker cast to his complexion than you might normally find in someone originating in one of the Slavic countries.