ooc: inspo

[arcaneadvisor]

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words;

[arcaneadvisor]

[arcaneadvisor]

Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.

Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

[arcaneadvisor]

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

[arcaneadvisor]

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

W.B. Yeats

[arcaneadvisor]

Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed, the powerless, the hungry and the abused. It gives heart and tongue to stones and trees. It wears the rough skin of beasts. It turns on a civilization that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

[arcaneadvisor]

…the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.

Terry Pratchett, Legends 1

[arcaneadvisor]

The laws of courtesy are so inconvenient: do not set fire to this chevalier, do not encase that baroness in a block of ice… How are we supposed to get through the day?

Morrigan, The Last Court

[arcaneadvisor]

When we write witches into our stories, that is what we’re writing about: power. When we write witches, we are writing about our expectations of women, and what we hope—and fear—they would do if they had access to power. Fictional witches act as ciphers that help us understand something that seems at once mysterious and brilliant and sinister: a woman’s ultimate, unlimited potential… realized.

Sarah Gailey, Why We Write About Witches

[arcaneadvisor]

Hear what Valerius said to Rufinus: You do not know that woman is the Chimaera, but it is good that you should know it; for that monster was of three forms; its face was that of a radiant and noble lion, it had the filthy belly of a goat, and it was armed with the virulent tail of a viper. And he means that a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.

Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum

[arcaneadvisor]

For every woman is at heart a witch.

Charles, G. Leland, Aradia, Gospel of the Witches

[arcaneadvisor]

I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.

Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

[arcaneadvisor]

Witches preferred to cut enemies dead with a look. There was no sense in killing your enemy. How would she know you’d won?

Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

[arcaneadvisor]

The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I’ve been able to come up with is “symbolic action with intent” — “action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world.

Pamela J. Grossman, The Year of the Witch

[arcaneadvisor]

It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in’t.

William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

[arcaneadvisor]

You have witchcraft in your lips.

William Shakespeare, Henry V

Leliana/Morrigan;

[arcaneadvisor]

[arcaneadvisor]

In an alternative universe, you teach
me love isn’t supposed to hurt (“it should feel like
drifting downstream with the angels singing
something holy and divine.”)
I learn the meaning of the word crave.
For the first time, someone’s fingerprints
don’t cause any damage.

Jessica Therese, I do not need another metaphor for burning

[arcaneadvisor]

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or loveable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness… there’s no telling what I might do.

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

[arcaneadvisor]

It was a mistake to keep this single knife in my heart
so long, but it is my knife, and my heart, too

Richard Jackson, Basic Algebra

[arcaneadvisor]

It does me no good; violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense it is being tested.

Louise Glück, October

[arcaneadvisor]

Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn’t, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.

Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

[arcaneadvisor]

At the end of the day, you have to do what’s best for you. You can’t live for someone else. You can’t let your guilt define your life.

Katie Alender, As Dead as It Gets