Fantasy Authors

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

"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."

"If you get all your schoolwork for the day done in, say, three hours, you can spend the rest of the time reading or making up stories or whatever else."

"By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would call charming, meaning not quite as large as you’d like."

"All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way."

"When you speak the future, you shape the future."

"We're all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth."

"It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all."

"A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly."

"I love having existential crises at bedtime, it's so restful."

"You feel like it's going to rain."

"But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing."

"But the world I wanted wasn't the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever."

"She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all."

"I'd want to. If you want, I want."

"Of course I was afraid. But I had learned to fear other things more: being despised, whittled down one small piece of myself at a time, smirked at and taken advantage of. I put my chin up and said, as cold as I could be in answer, “And what will you give me in return?"

"But hope is good strong drink, especially when you can get someone else to buy it for you."

"“There’s no such thing as normal people, I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less."

"“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it."

"I’m not stupid, nor a liar,” I said, “and if I can’t do any good, I can at least do something"

"And I wasn’t old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon."

"They all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them-- this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man."

"I think that a lot of anti-Semitism is historically a deflection of resentment of capital. It’s a deflection of that by the elite onto Jews, who are a convenient population to target. And this was something that happened in Western Europe and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish community became a piggy bank for rulers. These rulers deflected hostility from people who felt themselves being exploited but didn’t understand the system of exploitation."

"Young women aren’t allowed to be selfishly angry. They’re sometimes allowed to be angry in a sort of righteous way for other people, but they are often discouraged from being like, “This is unfair to me. I’m mad for me, and I want these things for me.” I think it’s really important for women to fight against the idea that they’re not allowed to want things for themselves."

"I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on."

"Thrice, mortal maiden,” in a rhyme almost like a song, “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself."

"A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true"

"Uprooted is very much about my mother’s side of the family, who were Polish Catholics. They were deeply patriotic and deeply rooted in their country...Spinning Silver is about my father’s family, and they were Lithuanian Jews who had to escape persecution—not just from the Nazis, but from their own neighbors."

"A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp."

"I am not your subject or your servant, and if you want a cowering mouse for a wife, go find someone else who can turn silver to gold for you."

"The only thing that had ever done me any good in my father’s house was thinking: no one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I’d had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I’d never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life."

"In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other."

"Providing the narrative thread to life is one of the oldest functions in culture. People need storytellers. They make sense out of life. Instead of being an abstract concept, a road without an end, life becomes something that we can touch, hear, feel, taste, see. Chekhov gave us the Lady with the Dog, James Joyce gave us Leopold Bloom, Sandra Cisneros gave us Woman Hollering Creek, and by creating the specifics of a life, they give us a sense, they make sense of, life."

"That's what we do as artists: we collect, we connect, we serve as scribes for the collective culture, and as messengers between worlds. Most important, we bring these symbols to the public. This is our gift, our regalo, our ofrenda. But it's up to the reader, the viewer, the listener, to bring out the power of these stories, to call out their names, and give them a place in the world."

"In Latin America, there hasn't necessarily been a clear line between fantastic literature and literary fiction. This has allowed writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Clarice Lispector to be noticed by upstanding and respectable critics of modern culture, and has led to the eventual translation of their work, as well as that of many others. They now form a canon of work against which all the rest of us must be compared, although, in many cases, we have little in common with them other than the Spanish language."

"Writers collect things. We read magazines, we ride buses and eavesdrop on other people's conversations, we stop and read posters on telephone poles, we examine soup cans and old clothing stores and babies and pets and sewer covers and weather reports. We delve into ancient history, old gossip, rumors, hints of rumors, maps, brochures, irrelevant details, bad advice, good omens, lucky stars, and things that are nobody's business. In short, we are called to be witnesses. Things may happen, but unless someone takes note of it, it might not matter."

"No matter what the venue, we can be witnesses to our own existence. "If we do not define ourselves for ourselves," said Audre Lorde, "we will be defined by others- for their use and our detriment." Each generation must look around with a critical eye and ask, "Is this who I am? How will we be portrayed to future generations?""

"What I do know is that a writer's main job is to always be open to the possibilities of story. Like the interconnected lakes, old stories lead to new ones, and lead to new ways of seeing and living in the world. Like Amalia clutching her yellow roses, I will continue to follow these stories wherever they lead me. ("The Skeleton in the Closet" September 24, 2003)"

"She could drop her shyness the way she dropped it to recite a speech or a poem, then step back into it like a cloak."

"We each seek to retrace those steps that led us from where we once were, to where we are now. ("Found in Translation")"

"After all, what is the passing of time but a diamond turned to dust?"

"as time succeeded time into a whirlpool of eternity."

"When children went every day to school to learn to live in a world that no longer existed."

"I am a person born not only of translations, but of transitions-my very existence marks that conjunction between one culture and another. By claiming this borderland as my own, by acknowledging that I am neither one nor the other, but both, I have been able to reach out and find the parts of each culture that pertain to me. I will never really understand Mexican politics, or be able to tell a joke in English; but I appreciate the beauty and magic inherent in both languages. I have come to realize, finally, that my life's work, whatever it has been called, is the act of translation. Not necessarily from one language to another, but between world views. I am a translator between worlds, between cultures, between jargons and contexts. And in trying to explain these many worlds to others and to myself, I have become a writer. ("Found in Translation")"

"Each of these women has a story. Each beat incredible odds to get where she is today. They, too, have given a helping hand to other women on the way up. That's what they have in common with the women of their grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' generations. They didn't stop worrying about equal rights and equal access when they made personal gains. They turned around and said, 'There's room for you, too.' ("Against All Odds," September 1992, Hispanic Women's Network, Olympia, Washington)"

"Once we lost the keys to our houses in Barcelona during The Plague, or the Inquisition or whatever other excuse was given for taking our properties, all the world was our temporary habitation. We saw each place through the eyes of the stranger seeking that pocket of refuge where we could set up shop until the next disaster turned people against us."

"Tater was proud of her unusual name, and secretly hoped she was like them, ordinary at first look, but gem-like on the inside. Rooted."

"Writing about family history has taught me that much of who we think we are is based on the unexplainable. ("The Skeleton in the Closet" September 24, 2003)"

"what doesn't seem like much to you now, could mean a lot to someone else. We each know what we went through, but we can only guess at the odds facing young women today. But from among them will come the next century's Sor Juana or Matilda Montoya or Hermila Galindo or Elena Poniatowska or Margarita Prentice or Hermelinda Gonzalez. We are here speculating on futures, gambling that they will make it, against the odds, but with our faith and support bearing them up on wings of success. ("Against All Odds")"

"This is how they took back the world - step by step, song by song."