THE INHERITOR - MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

The Inheritor - Pg 347

   The temple seemed to vibrate with soft tension, and it seemed that there was the sound somewhere of a very distant bell, and Leslie knew that somewhere, sometime, in another world or another galaxy or another life, she had stood like this and watched a man she loved damn himself from life to life, and that he had turned away from the offered redemption.

The Inheritor - Pg 297

   When the dishes had been returned to the altar, Leslie asked, "What now?"
   "Now," said Claire prosaically, "we scramble some eggs or something. We both need food, to close down the psychic centers." And when Leslie would have asked questions, Claire shook her head. "Don't talk about it," she said, "it dissipates the power. Later."

The Inheritor - Pg 292

   Claire whispered, "Alison is not happy with what has happened here."
   Mediums, Leslie thought in disgust. Why did they never have anything to say except the obvious? Quoting from the world's most famous ghost story, she said aloud, dryly, "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the gravel To tell us this."

The Inheritor - Pg 291

   "Your old stereotype devil is no more than horns and hoofs and a goat—the medieval Christian version of the Great God Pan. Pan was harmless—even benevolent. And that's one of the archetypes from the collective unconscious that keeps turning up in the human race's psyche. But the church fathers in the Middle Ages were so inhibited and sexphobic that whenever they got a glimpse of that particular archetype they had to believe it was the devil."
   "Why would they mix up Pan with the devil?"
   "Because the human is the only animal, except the goat, which has full-time sexuality. Other mammals turn it off unless they're breeding. And the goat has always been the archetypal image of unbridled sexuality. Which scared the hell out of your church fathers, who preferred dividing sheep from goats. Pan would be a devil to people whose prime objective was repressing their own sexuality."

The Inheritor - Pg 252

   Was any human problem, in fact, soluble? She felt overwhelmed with the weight of human misery.

The Inheritor - Pg 249

   Many things had surprised her lately; the calmness with which she had begun to accept this part of her life was one of them. There was a balance to everything. Simon and Emily had music to give the world. She had only such small skill as she could give to the troubled, and that was too little to justify all she had been given, so she must use this other gift too.

The Inheritor - Pg 246

   The garden was so peaceful, green leaves surrounding her with light; the very sky seemed to cast a greenish color over her. There was so much green here for a city built on sand dunes. But every blade of it, she remembered, even the exotics in Golden Gate Park, had been brought here by human agency, and cultivated blade by blade and leaf by leaf. Was there a lesson somewhere in that, that one could not leave everything to nature? Briefly she had a vision of the city stretching bare, waves of sand out to the sea.

The Inheritor - Pg 205

   "If thoughts can affect the material universe, and I think the evidence is in that it can, then the work we do on the material plane—purifications, incense, protecting thoughts or prayers, whichever way you wish to define them—then these thoughts can spread out beyond this level where we are sweeping and cleaning and performing our rituals, to create a psychic barrier to unwanted intrusions from other levels of the Universe. I honestly could not say whether it is in fact subjective or objective, but I also believe it does not matter; results are what matter to me, and those I have seen."

The Inheritor - Pg 202

   The nearest he ever came to mentioning religion, on one occasion when she said carelessly, "God damn it," upon snagging a run in her pantyhose, he said lightly, "My darling, it seems absurd to condemn something to eternal theological punishment when what you mean is How very tiresome."

The Inheritor - Pg 201

   "Satanists create their own devils, as pious religious people summon up their own God, and I want nothing whatever to do with either of them. Most organized churches call up thoughtforms of a God just as bigoted as anyone else's devil."

The Inheritor - Pg 201

   "I have no graven images or idols, no hint of Satan or demons; I think all that is disgustingly vulgar; Satanists and such idiots are usually ineffective rebels who had a painful overdose of Catholic bigotry in childhood and want to kick over the sacred traces."

The Inheritor - Pg 200

   "We do not have a radio and probably would not turn it on if we did—we have better things to do with ourselves." He touched her intimately, and she snuggled close to him. "But even without the radio, all those things, the Latin Mass, the rock music blasting, the babbling crazies, they are all around us somewhere in the air waves. Do you think we are unaffected by them, even though we have not tuned them in?"

The Inheritor - Pg 197

   Why at that moment did she remember Colin saying, If it would do any good, you could have my hands. She knew it was true of her. She would give her hand for his, and do it without flinching, and knew this was what was meant by love.

The Inheritor - Pg 196

   "I hope you welcomed me," he said soberly, caressing her breasts with his scarred hand. He had removed the splinted glove that kept the fourth and fifth fingers extended, and they were curled motionless against his palm. "The doctors say I must use these fingers constantly if I wish to regain their perfect use." He moved them on her in a way she had not known how to desire before this.

The Inheritor - Pg 195

   She had never believed in love, certainly not in romantic love, and her training as a psychologist had made her very skeptical; either it was a fantasy of silly women, sentimental nonsense by which they strove to justify actions based on sexual passion, or else it was a myth invented to exploit those same silly women and sell them trashy novels, makeup and perfume.
   She had never felt remotely like this.

The Inheritor - Pg 195

   "We are applause junkies, all of us who want to perform. That is what colorless people like Colin will never understand; when you have known that particular high, everything else becomes bland, ordinary, dead; you live only when you are before an audience, and everything and everyone becomes only part of an audience."

The Inheritor - Pg 193

   "The career of a concert performer dies with him, but the teacher lives as long as his pupils, and the legacy of the great conductors transforms music for a whole generation."

The Inheritor - Pg 189

   "I am not really a religious person," Claire said, then amended it. "No, that's not true. I am a religious person. I just hate the enormous lot of rubbish people talk when they start talking religion, so I try to avoid that kind of jargon."

The Inheritor - Pg 189

   "People who have a religious approach, those who are into Wicca or involved with the Mystery religions, sometimes speak of being 'in the Craft' instead of being on the Path, but it's the same thing: being aware of the road we all travel from life to life toward—whatever it is that you think we are sent here to accomplish."