Fantasy Authors

"We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been."

"“So what’s wrong with capitalism?” He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he’s a capitalist. But then he says, “It’s not a fair system.” “That’s stupid,” I say. “Things aren’t fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.”"

"Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it."

"I suppose to him it looks as if I threw everything away, but how can he understand how our choices are taken from us? He doesn’t even understand freedom and what an illusion it really is."

"One Christmas my dippy older sister was talking about God protecting her from some minor calamity, some domestic crisis involving getting a dent in her husband’s Ford pickup, and later, as we drove home, Allan said, grinning, “I’m so glad that God is looking after Matt’s pickup. Makes up for whatever he was doing during, you know, Cambodia, or the Black Plague.”"

"We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst."

"So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism. “People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.” He laughs. Anything I say about politics makes him laugh."

"That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning?"

"Sydney had never forgotten to eat in her life. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd."

"After a minute Damien looked over her cube wall. His head was right above the Mardi Gras mask hung on her wall. She didn’t particularly want to go to Mardi Gras, which seemed to be mostly about blonde girls flashing their tits; she just liked masks."

"It’s true that we are free to do whatever we want, even go to France on a whim. We can make any choice we want. We can do anything we want. We just have to not care about consequences."

"We went to Cancun, my Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip to Cancun. We stayed in a resort hotel with a pool that went halfway around the hotel and had two swim-up bars. Being in Mexico I thought everything would be more foreign, but in Cancun things felt a lot the same. There was McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut, even Wal-mart. Mel said it looked just like Florida, only more people speak Spanish in Florida."

"With age comes wisdom. Or at least experience."

"Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all."

"In the end, words are all that survive us."

"He’d volunteered for the Howard Institute program because of the most basic human motivation—tourism. Seeing what was over the next hill had trumped even sex as the driving force in human evolution."

"Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time."

"Magic, the blessed curse that gnaws at the soul and leaves a void in the mind into which too much that is alien and deadly can settle."

"“No,” Horn replied. “I am a seeker of wisdom.” The old man squinted, taking in Horn’s scars, motley head of fire-scarred hair, and ropy muscles. “Looks like you haven’t found it yet, or you’d have learned to stay out of trouble.”"

"“Some things change a man slowly. Journeys. The passage of years. The love of a good woman. Imprisonment.” The monk paused a moment. Horn sensed he was speaking from experience, looking back at his own paths. Then: “Some things change a man swiftly. War. Disease. Shipwrecks. The love of a bad woman.”"

"With age came wisdom. Sometimes wisdom came with an ass kicking, too. And nothing could kick ass like the whole world."

"Unwise or unlucky wizards learned fast enough how much one paid for one’s mistakes. One sometimes paid more dearly for one’s successes."

"Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern-recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well."

"All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God’s dreaming. But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptomatically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese-twinned to its precursor."

"People say there are no atheists in the foxholes, but people are idiots. It’s awfully tough to believe in God when you’re knee deep in mud, blood, and other men’s guts. Combat is the Problem of Evil on the hoof."

"Springfield McKenna didn’t place much faith in rumors. She’d traded in them far too long to lend credence to someone else’s social munitions."

"The problem with basing your entire economy and raison d’être on a constrained resource was that eventually you ran out of the resource in question. Decisions which had seemed canny two centuries ago during the bright days of the port’s founding and initial construction were now foolhardy in the blindingly obvious light of hindsight."

"But if you really want to feel the stress of divine regard, spend time in an oncology unit. The half-hidden whispers and the strained smiles and the whirring click of the infusion pumps form a choir of pain every bit as agonized as the howls of the damned in some imagined hell."

"Because, really, what else is there? Life is years of sheer, endless boredom punctuated by bouts of the mildly interesting. Not much to do, not much to believe in. Just eat, sleep, shit, breathe, breed, grow old and die."

"Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us."

"All men are born to die…Once a fool pretends otherwise."

"There is no devil mocking you. God didn’t give you cancer to punish you. Colon cancer has come to you through a combination of losing the genetic lottery, cosmic rays, and perhaps too much bacon in your younger days."

"Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced."

"I know he is important Meat because he is dressed like a fool and doing no work."

"Sarita placed little faith in such rumors. The fears of small people everywhere could speak louder than any voice, and with less reason. Legends were just that: legendary."

"He was never a churchgoing man, McAllen, but anyone who’s stood when the bullets fly or watched over the herds when the wolf packs are hunting down the moon knows better than to disbelieve. Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world."

"These are the hard truths: Some words were never meant to be read. Some thoughts cannot be undone. Some darknesses shall never be dispelled. Some people will never believe these truths."

"The first thing that Carol Emshwiller said to us when she began teaching in the final week of the 2000 Clarion West Writers Workshop was, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent." This was the first clue I had to the importance Carol places on precision and refinement."

"Emshwiller's readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction. But her books, mostly published by a good small press in San Francisco, Mercury House, don't get wide attention. Part of the problem may well be her calm originality. Most reviewers prefer pigeons that fit in holes and rabbits that redux. Emshwiller's like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but no—her voice is perfectly her own. She isn't like anybody. She's different."

"I'm a firm believer that your ideas come from the writing itself. I never have any until I start to write. And my mind is on structure most of the time (and on linking). I used to say that kept my conscious mind busy so my subconscious mind could work on more important things."

"Favorite SF author? Lots. Barry Malzburg, Fritz Leiber, Tom Disch, Damon Knight. . ."

"I don't know where my "meanings" come from. I just try to write a good well formed story. I guess the meaning is just part of me and pops out by itself."

"Don't put anything important in your stories you don't use all through. To me, this is what's fun for the writer and fun, too, in reading."

"People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgments."

"I guess since the groin is the center of a guy's world, he rarely guesses it isn't the center of yours."

"His shoulder bumped mine again. "Can I ask you something?" I didn't answer. He was going to ask me anyway. People don't say that if they don't want to pry something out of you."

"Hello, Officer? Can you help me? My dad got turned into a zombie. You know, we’ve been travelling around getting rid of things that aren’t real, and this time they hit back. I really need someplace to stay – but can you make sure I have some holy water or something wherever it is? And some silver-jacketed bullets? That’d be sweet. Yeah, that’d be totally cool. Thanks. And while you’re at it, can you tell the guys with the straitjackets that I’m really sane? That would help."

"Better to be strong than pretty and useless."

"That's the funny thing about old hurts- they just wait for new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you."

"People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want to put you into their little preordained slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgements. That’s the only way the normal world’s like the Real – it all depends on who people think you are. Figure that out, play to what they expect, and it’s clear sailing."