Tamsin 0 csillagozás

When I was really young, if there was one thing I wanted in the world, it was to be invisible.

(első mondat)

Tamsin laughed that spring-rain laugh of hers. „Alas, my poor Jenny – awash in hobgoblins, besieged by bogles. Truly, there are no such creatures in you New York?”
„Only in junior high school.”

140. oldal

Her voice was really quiet. She said, „My Jenny, I will never see your own land, yet well I know night's as dark there as in Dorset. And night is not ours, and never will be, not till all is night. I tell you it will not, Jenny – never any more ours than the sa, for all we plough and harrow up that darkness. What yet swims in the deepest deep, I'm sure none can say – and not even the Pooka knows all that may move beyond the light. But you have friends there now – do but remember that, and you'll come to no harm. You have friends in the night, dear Jenny.”

140. oldal

You don't have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believe in 1685 — all you have to do is see his face, his voice when he says the word… and than you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people.

…because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.

This creature is the Pooka. Pay no mind to the shape he wears, for he’s none of his own, and no soul either. Ware him ever, trust him never, but when the wind’s right he has his uses. Never forget that you will never know him. The Pooka’s mystery even to the Pooka.

There's a line in the Bible about perfect love casting out fear. That I don't know about, but orneriness will do it every time.

He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know.

But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing — recognition is something else.

She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost—but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.