Fantasy Authors

"He’d expected torture. He hadn’t expected surgery."

"It isn’t courtly politics if somebody doesn’t get a dagger in the back."

"It’s not my fault your makers made you humorless."

"“Absence of proof,” said Bell, “is not proof of absence.”"

"We’ve drawn attention to ourselves with our obsessive need to stay inconspicuous."

"And, as was so often the case, the history taught to children was oversimplified, watered down, and ofttimes counterfactual."

"How could you comprehend things whose existence you doubt?"

"They were old enough to know such things were forbidden, yet young enough still to find the forbidden irresistible rather than terrifying."

"Heartlessness wasn’t the sole province of the rich."

"Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged. It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying. Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him. How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do? How did they know when to do anything without the benefit of geasa and metageasa to prioritize every single action of their waking lives? How did they order their daily existence without somebody to tell them what to do?"

"First, the fact he awoke at all. Cogito, ergo how the hell aren’t I dead?"

"The fallacy of your personal bias is inherent in your choice of words."

"To lose the satchel now would prove that God, if He existed, was a truly sadistic son of a bitch."

"In the Chronicles, you get the presence of Lewis. You get the cast of his mind in a way that's unequalled in any of his other books. Lewis once said that the imaginative man in him was more basic than any other aspect. In the Chronicles, every part of him was brought into play: the depth of his intellect, the depth of his knowledge, the richness of his imagination. They all work organically together and achieved this remarkable series of not one, but seven connected books. It's folly to predict the future, but being a fool, I'll say that maybe in 150 years it will be The Chronicles of Narnia that are the most remembered of Lewis's work."

"Just as we can explore Narnia and Middle-earth, there is a way-of-seeing amongst the Inklings (even they don’t see identically) that is attractive and has a kind of homeliness, despite the choking tobacco smoke and half empty glasses on table surfaces swimming with ale and cider. Their way-of-seeing is often challenging to us as moderns, because in their own ways they are intent on undeceiving us (to use a term of Lewis’s). They see us as needing a perspective from outside of ourselves to see both the strengths and weaknesses of our own period."

"Colin has the gift of synthesizing a great deal of material and making it wonderfully clear and accessible. When I see Colin’s name on a book, I know it will be trustworthy and true."

"Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims. They can be survivors but I don't as a rule put "messages" in my writing."

"When bad fortune occurs, the unresourceful, unimaginative man looks about him to attach the blame to someone else; the resolute accepts misfortune and endeavors to survive, mature, and improve because of it."

"Drummer, beat, and piper, blow, Harper, strike, and soldier, go. Free the flame and sear the grasses Till the dawning Red Star passes."

"Exchange information, learn to speak sensibly about any subject, learn to express your thoughts, accept new ones, examine them, analyze. Think objectively. Think toward the future."

"Who wills, Can. Who tries, Does. Who loves, Lives."

"… I was wary of engaging in any sort of savior complex; the incarcerated are most qualified to speak about their own experiences, but I wanted to tell people some of what I saw and heard and read about in these places. I had to get it out of me. And, given my time in law school and as a legal professional who has dealt in these systems, I felt I had the kind of background that was needed to do this telling. This wasn't a faceless black mass I was trying to humanize, these were specific stories I needed to get out of me and felt were especially compelling…"

"As some are drawn to bars and others to churches, I’m drawn to bookstores and libraries. They’re sanctuaries. They’re sanctuary. Hope germinates in me that osmosis will take place and whatever goodness is in those books that got them a place on those shelves will leak into me and I’ll produce something that could someday go there."

"He had no choice. And that one thing turned Heaven into Hell."

"“Cynical bastard, aren’t you?” “Every man is a mirror,” Nozawa said flatly. “We all reflect what we see.”"

"No man escapes Death. So Death must not be the enemy. Life must not be the prize. It must be the gameboard, on which Death teaches its savage lessons. You could heed those lessons, or ignore them, but never evade them. Death, then, was the ally. Not to be sought, but heeded."

"Lesbianism is the ultimate expression of a feminist philosophy."

"The world doesn’t give a damn what we feel or want. Only what we are, and what we do."

"“It’s bigger than death, Aubry.” “You’re wrong,” he said, his voice utterly chill. “Nothing is bigger than death.”"

"It would have been a terrible thing to die a fool and a liar. Truth, at any cost, is worth the price."

"Aubry looked at her without shifting his head. Damn, she was lovely. An unpleasant question remained: What where they to each other? It was hard to say sometimes. Did he truly feel love, or just the effects of the Cyloxibin mushroom? And was there a difference?"

"“You know, it isn’t that you can’t get information in electronic form, or microfilm, or disk, or cube, or any of the other forms—tape, holographic computer feed.” He paused. “Tell me, Aubry—what’s the similarity between all the modes of information storage I’ve just named?” Aubry scratched his head. “They don’t take up as much space as books, I guess.” “Yes, that’s true enough—but as far as I’m concerned, the difference is that they all require an external power source.” He cocked his head sideways, until he looked absurdly like a bird examining a piece of fruit. “Do you understand that that makes you dependent upon others?” Promise ran her hands over the spines of a nearby stack, then shook her head. “Not cubes. There are plenty of solar-powered cube-readers. One sunny day a week, and you’re set.” “True enough, but you are still dependent upon others to repair your viewer if it breaks down...the more advanced a technology, the more fragilely inter-dependent it is.” “So what?” Warrick shrugged. “It just seems to me that the most valuable thing that any human has is the ability to educate himself, to find out about the world around him, to program his primary organ of perception—his brain. And that basic, inalienable right should be as independent of external factors as possible. Once a book is printed and acquired, it’s yours. Nothing else is needed except a pair of eyes and daylight. Individual books have lasted for hundreds of year—do you really think you can say the same of your little viewers, or computers, or whatever? If you have a hundred libraries stored on cube, and your viewer breaks down, you have nothing. Give me an encyclopedia, and if it isn’t totally destroyed by fire, I can dig it out, dry it off, piece it together, and still have something of value.” His gaze became direct, and piercing. “There is nothing more important than directing the flow of information into your mind. It determines all—your attitudes, your actions, your life. You can rely upon the visual and audible media all you want—but they should be in addition to reading, not in place of it. If other forms replace reading, then your input is restricted, and much more dependent upon other people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.” “So, that’s the most important thing you can think of in life? Reading?” Warrick sighed. “You are being obstinate, my friend. You learn if you learn.”"

"Hate comes from the past, fear from the future. Pain and pleasure are now, and therefore their own trap."

"And your life is ruined because you tried to do the Right Thing. Join the club honey—guess what, there are a few more of us out here who’ve had our brains beaten our with our own dreams."

"I’m damned tired of being needed. Being needed is just the flip side of being royally screwed."

"Definitions are just words, just labels. And once you label something, the label gets between you and the thing."

"“Don’t be afraid of dying. A Warrior lives with death, Aubry. Welcome it as an ally. All other fears are just fragments of death, forms of unbecoming. A fighter clings to life, and therefore cannot win. A warrior treats life and death as the same thing, and therefore cannot lose.”"

"“Chicken?” “Don’t want my feathers ruffled, it that’s what you mean.”"

"Truth could not be spawned in lies and deceit."

"Marketing is finding women who like sex or would like to find out if they do. Sales is convincing them that they want to go home with YOU, right NOW."

"It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete. Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. “Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due."

"“That was what we were told. It doesn’t entirely ring true.” “Why not?” “Because the President of the United States is always bound by the deals that he makes to get to his position. Delacourte can’t make any kinds of drastic changes, regardless of what he claims. The chief executive isn’t an emperor.”"

"The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit."

"They provide relief. Sometimes, it’s the relief of the same genre as what we find in a church sanctuary when the minister ascends to the pulpit and late-morning sunlight is blasting through the windows behind him to gild him and the congregants before you as the choir reaches the climax of the doxology. Sometimes, it’s the relief of a kind yet somehow firm-and-gentle hand at the back of the neck, kneading away not sorrow but the loneliness that can attend it. Sometimes, it’s the relief of discovering you’re no longer bound by the laws of gravity and that, yes, you can actually fly. Sometimes, it’s an answer. Stories do all of these things for us. I’m convinced we’d be utterly lost without them."

"…The idea of police forces as little more than white militia employed to ensure a certain social stratification highlighted just how temporally ever-present police brutality is in American history. And I wanted to capture the intergenerationality of the national paroxysms, embodied in the riots and protests that followed so many of these killings."

"(Part I paragraph 4)"

"I hate it here. Everything's so—' She searches for a word that will tell Mama how violent it always is or how much she hates having to hide in the closet every time it even looks like gangbangers might roll through...--"

"The Devil is busy here...The gangs, the drugs, all the evil that men do to each other here. Sometimes even..."

"(Part I paragraph 1)"

"Wanden olstrum end kendesorum. Isen ne bejstrum."