Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp cutting shards shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly both caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores she was insanity wrapped up in the thin transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity and she was afraid because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.

Pictures ... flashed on her in sudden color too much color shocking color the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.

When reading the history of the Jewish people of their flight from slavery to death of their exchange of tyrants I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable cruel revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over and that they would soon in the land of Canaan surrounded by their wives and little ones forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty this God forgetting every promise said to the wretches in his powerYour carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted. This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart cannot be accepted as a revelation from God.When we think of the poor Jews destroyed murdered bitten by serpents visited by plagues decimated by famine butchered by each other swallowed by the earth frightened cursed starved deceived robbed and outraged how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah Pharaoh was a benefactor and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God.While reading the Pentateuch I am filled with indignation pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert the prey of famine sword and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree governed by falsehood plundered by hypocrisy they were the sport of priests and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy and death their only friend.It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable hateful and arrogant being than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He only is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music beauty nor joy. A false friend an unjust judge a braggart hypocrite and tyrant sincere in hatred jealous vain and revengeful false in promise honest in curse suspicious ignorant and changeable infamous and hideoussuch is the God of the Pentateuch.

To write your dreams of fantasy is to create fantasy in anothers dreams

Her eyes were of different colors the left as brown as autumn the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old or thereabouts her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God it seemed had withheld that possibility as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touchedby genius by madness by the Devil or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever. p.33

Even if she be not harmed her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking from her nerves and in sleep from her dreams.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.