The Portent and Other Stories

“A man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it so little, that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim change in his dream for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last, he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality. So, likewise, one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck, and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all his imagining. He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance behind him.””

— George MacDonald

“For her heart, I know that cannot grow old; and while the heart is young, man may laugh Old Time in the face, and dare him to do his worse.””

— George MacDonald

“I never had been by any means a book-worm; but the very outside of a book had a charm to me. It was a kind of sacrament”

— George MacDonald

“What is time, but the airy ocean in which ghosts come and go!””

— George MacDonald

“And when we met amid the shadows, we were wrapped in the mantle of love, and from its folds looked out fearless on the ghostly world about us. Ghosts or none, they never annoyed us. Our love was a talisman, yea, an elixir of life, which made us equal to the twice-born”

— George MacDonald

“Self-love is the foulest of all foul feeders, and will defile that it may devour.””

— George MacDonald