Fantasy Authors

"That was the nature of chaos; its effects spanned time in ways that were not always immediately discernible, not even by beings outside of time."

"Besides, for poets it wasn’t lying, it was art."

"“Any chance you own a hijab?” The answer was no, but Malika could borrow one. Come to that, she could steal one freshly washed off the wall behind her house and claim a sudden, God-inspired attack of modesty if she got caught. The old crows were quite stupid enough to believe that."

"There was no way she could know, but Prisoner Zero asked anyway because he was talking to himself; which was all anyone ever did, it seemed to him, talk to themselves while half meanings and misunderstandings fed into the minds of those who thought they were listening."

"But those would be lies and Tris never lied to herself. At least not more than was required to stay human or sane. Lying to others was different. That was what people like her did if they wanted to remain alive."

"“We’re getting old,” he said. “No,” said Paula Zarte. “You are. I’m just not as young as I was.”"

"The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn’t good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter."

"Inside every adult was a child, or so it is said. Professor Petra Mayer was different. Inside Petra Mayer was an impossibly beautiful, barefoot adolescent who wouldn’t have been seen dead giving her inner child the time of day."

"The third nightfall was less impressive than the second, which mirrored a rule Tris had already identified; new emotions devalued, going from intense through familiar to reach a kind of ghost state where one no longer really noticed them at all."

"The fifty-third Chuang Tzu wore the very first on his cloak as a diamond buckle. Every emperor became a diamond eventually. It was one of the few advantages of living as a carbon-based life form."

"Gene Newman was Catholic, although not so Catholic that he had more than two children."

"Why would we do this? she asked, watching smoke trickle towards the ceiling. A whole world of rigid rules covering temperature, convection and Brownian motion all busily pretending to be truly chaotic."

"“That’s impossible,” said Tris. “Most things are,” Luca said, “if you think about them for long enough.”"

"Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent."

"He had been fighting with himself longer than he could remember and was still not sure who was winning."

"Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction. Living forever turned out to be much like long-term sex, psychologically tricky; which was why what killed the original colonists was not hardship but boredom."

"The Night Land is one of the most extraordinary works in the English language. It is the story of the human race, trying to live long after it should have gone, long after everything should have gone, after the Sun has died, and the utter existential horror of that fact is the merest backdrop. It is a bestiary and an atlas of the bleakest dread imaginable. It is a piece of such stunning imaginative power, such awesome and terrible beauty, such majesty, that it defies its own faults and is a masterpiece."

"Among those fiction writers who have elected to deal with the shadowlands and borderlands of human existence, William Hope Hodgson surely merits a place with the very few that inform their treatment of such themes with a sense of authenticity. His writing itself, as Mr. Lovecraft justly says, is far from equal in stylistic merit: but it would be impossible to withhold the rank of master from an author who has achieved so authoritatively, in volume after volume, a quality that one might term the realism of the unreal. In some ways, Hodgson's work is no doubt most readily comparable to that of Algernon Blackwood. But I am not sure that even Blackwood has managed to intimate a feeling of such profound and pervasive familiarity with the occult as one finds in The house on the Borderland. Hideous phantoms and unknown monsters from the nightward gulf are adumbrated in all their terror, with no dispelling of their native mystery; and surely such things could be described only by a seer who has dwelt overlong on the perilous verges and has peered too deeply into the regions veiled by invisibility from normal sight."

"Hodgson also promised “certain thrills, merely taking the story as a story,” and even the most purely sensation-seeking reader would be hard put to deny that he accomplished that. Generic critics may quibble about whether The House on the Borderland belongs more properly to the sphere of visionary fantasy than to that of supernatural horror — or even to science fiction, given the astronomical details that accompany the space-time visions — but few would deny that the novel stands as a remarkable imaginative feat."

"Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and significant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connexion with regions or buildings."

"Mr. H. C. Koenig has conferred a great service on American “fandom” by calling attention to the remarkable work of an author relatively unknown in this country, yet actually forming one of the few who have captured the illusive inmost essence of the weird. Among connoisseurs of phantasy fiction William Hope Hodgson deserves a high and prominent rank; for, triumphing over a sadly uneven stylistic quality, he now and then equals the best masters in his vague suggestions of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life."

"Yet, even did it be ever proved that Man once to be a fish, I to have no cause to abate the first part of mine argument; but to have the more need of the thought, that I gain power to accept the Fact; for I still then to have no occasion that I think Man to have been truly a Fish, or aught truly different from a Man; but only that he did be once Modified physically to his need, and to be still possessed of the Man-Spirit, though all lackt of development. Yet, truly, I to be less offend in my Reason, if that it be shown that Man did be ever somewise in his present shape, though mayhap so brutish as the Humpt Men; but yet I do be ready to consider all matters, and do build no Walls about my Reason. Yet, neither I to have an over-ready acceptance of aught, but to need that my Reason shall approve."

"And mayhap there to be no mystery in the thing; but a score of natural explainings, if that I did know, or had patience to think long enough upon such."

"And I to have gained Honour; yet to have learned that Honour doth be but as the ash of Life, if that you not to have Love. And I to have Love. And to have Love is to have all; for that which doth be truly LOVE doth mother Honour and Faithfulness; and they three to build the House of Joy."

"And lo! the creature did work slow in the brain."

"We truly to think that the world doth even now be old; and this to have seemed a true thing unto every age that ever did live."

"I first met Hope Hodgson about eleven years ago. At that date, his three best novels had been written; two of them, The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The House on the Borderland, had been published, and the third, The Ghost Pirates, was in the press. In those three stories he showed himself a writer of quite exceptional imaginative gifts, a master of the weird, the eerie, the terrible, whose strange and grim imaginings were not unworthy of comparison with the bizarre creations of Poe."

"And truly, I to hope that I have made this thing somewise clear unto you; for, indeed, it doth be something hard to set out; for every Age hath the subtleties peculiar to that Age; and these to be hard to the understanding of other Ages, but yet to seem plain and utter natural, even without thought, unto the Peoples of the Age."

"I am not at sea because I object to bad treatment, poor food, poor wages, and worse prospects. I am not at sea because very early I discovered that it is a comfortless, weariful and thankless life—a life compact of hardness and sordidness such as shore people can scarcely conceive. I am not at sea because I dislike being a pawn with the sea for a board and the shipowners for players."

"Another vast space went by, and the whole enormous flame had sunk to a deep, copper color. Gradually, it darkened, from copper to copper-red, and from this, at times, to a deep, heavy, purplish tint, with, in it, a strange loom of blood. Although the light was decreasing, I could perceive no diminishment in the apparent speed of the sun. It still spread itself in that dazzling veil of speed. The world, so much of it as I could see, had assumed a dreadful shade of gloom, as though, in very deed, the last day of the worlds approached."

"And, as doth be human, I brake my rule straightway in the beginning."

"And this doth show how a man may act foolishly, even when he doth believe that he hath a great caution; and surely it is borne in upon me afresh that none should trust over freely unto unproven matters, the which shall you heartily agree with; but yet do as foolishly, according to your lights and characters. And so shall you laugh not over hardly upon me."

"I saw many creatures that went about the fire, and did have warmth from the fire and drink from the spring; and surely I did ponder that the Peoples of this our Age should say, if they had stood with me, that Providence had made nigh together the warmth and the drink that were needful unto life (for it was grown to a bitter chill now in the Gorge). But rather did this thing seem to me otherwise, that these creatures did be but of their circumstance, and if that it had been another way, then had they grown of their wits to meet it to their means of life. Yet, as some would say, the arguments do but meet, and be the same thing."

"And, surely, this doth seem but a sane thinking unto me; but yet without proof, and to be said to you, only as the shapings of my thoughts."

"“My angel,” he says, cradling her. “I’m not an angel, Daniel.” “Yes, you are.” “No! I’m not an angel and I’m not a whore. I have intelligence and passion, strength and perseverance. I am capable of abstract thought, intellectual accomplishment, and artistic expression just like you, sir.” He ponders that as the brougham trots up Fifth Street to Market. “What shall I call you, then?” Zhu smiles. “You may call me a woman.”"

"If women go into politics, they’ll wind up as bad as men."

"Prostitution has little to do with morality, and everything to do with poverty."

"What is the value of a life when the world is burdened with twelve billion people?"

"He uncorks the absinthe, pours three rounds.… “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. After the third, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.”"

"Cosmicists speak of the Great Good, equalizing humanity with all creatures and things. Does a cosmicist accept the death of a child as the same as—say—the destruction of a butterfly? Suppose it’s a rare butterfly and the child is one of twelve billion."

"What is destiny for any human being? What becomes of probabilities that collapse out of the timeline? Does destiny depend on who witnesses?"

"When you finally cash it in Out in Frisco; And you end this life of sin Out in Frisco; They will gently toll a bell, Plant your carcass in a dell, There’s no need to go to hell, You’re in Frisco."

"That’s what failure did to: run you out, plucked your bones, sucked you dry. It was revolting. A failed man is a loathsome thing."

"Junk does that. Junk is a forge. You enter the fire and come out twisted."

"By the time people could speak about mandatory population control in a rational way, it was too late."

"“Boredom,” he says, “is the province of the unimaginative soul.”"

"Since they were little, wishing on the first star of the evening, they both understood this: the most exciting game in life is to invent yourself."

"The future survives because people care. Live responsibly or die."

"“Acid,” says the guy with the eyes, “raises your powers of integration so that everything is important.” “Acid,” says Chiron, “lowers your powers of discrimination so that everything seems important.”"

"I didn’t lie. I implied."