Fantasy Authors

"The sacrifice lives, but the sun’s still shining."

"That evening I met a black witch with a red cat, walking on a headland above the sea. I had reached the sea unexpectedly, but the sea is unexpected in any event to one who has never known it. You think it land at first, or sky, and penultimately mist. Then you realize a vast azure mass of water lies like a dragon in the sun’s last rays, breathing and shifting on the beaches."

"At some point, Dekteon saw, his own world had come close to such a religion, where women ruled and men died—but the road had taken a different turning. Now the hints of the ancient mystery remained only in songs. It was the men who were the masters. Maybe not for the better, and not for the worse, either. But all this was unimportant."

"“What’s Hell?” inquired Wild-Eye. “You should visit before you pass judgement on a place. And have you never heard it said, the Dark One is a gentleman?”"

"I was pretty sure you’d be weird. But now that I’ve met you, I can honestly say you’re even weirder."

"Balder holds up a completely blank rune. Wyrd. The beginning and the end. Fate. I don't know what that means, but it's not doing anything to uncreep me."

"The dark does not weep for itself because there is no light. Rather, it accepts that it is the dark. It is said that even the gods must die." He winks. "But not without one hell of a fight.”"

"Marisol does a silly dance with Balder and the screw, one in each hand, so that nobody gets the idea that she takes tins — or anything else, for that matter — seriously. And just like that, something in the cosmos shifts. A butterfly flaps its wings in South America. Snow falls in Chicago. You give an idiot a stupid magic screw and it turns out to be a necessary part after all."

"“Oh, hello," Dr. M says, shaking Balder's hand. "Wonderful costume. I'm a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?" "It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg," Balder answers. "Lovely. I got mine on the Internet.”"

"I'm one of those people who has to write. If I don't write, I feel itchy and depressed and cranky. So everybody's glad when I write and stop complaining already."

"People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all."

"You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real."

"In our travels, we have come across many equations — math for understanding the universe, for making music, for mapping stars, and also for tipping, which is important. Here is our favorite equation: Us plus Them equals All of Us. It is very simple math. Try it sometime. You probably won’t even need a pencil."

"My dad was a Presbyterian minister. Yes, I am one of those dreaded P.K.s — Preacher's Kids. Be afraid. Be very afraid…"

"My favorite word is "redemption." I like both its meaning and the sound. My least favorite word is "maybe." "Maybe" is almost always a "no" drawn out in cruel fashion."

"I have an artificial left eye. I lost my real eye in a car accident when I was eighteen. In fact, I had to have my entire face rebuilt because I smashed it up pretty good. It took six years and thirteen surgeries. However, I did have the pleasure of freezing a plastic eyeball in an ice cube, putting it in a friend's drink, ("Eyeball in your highball?") and watching him freak completely. Okay, so maybe that's not going down on my good karma record. But it sure was fun."

"I'm related to Davy Crockett on my mom's side. Honest."

"These are hard times. The world hurts. We live in fear and forget to walk with hope. But hope has not forgotten you. So ask it to dinner. It's probably hungry and would appreciate the invitation."

"What you need to do is take control of things. Don't wait for events to catch up with you; go and meet them head-on!"

"You think that Man can start again, do you, Shea? Well you might be quite surprised to learn that some things never change, and that the dangers of power are always present, even to a race that almost obliterated itself."

"“If you think that Man is free to build a new life while the rest of the world drifts by, then you do not know anything of history!”"

"The trick of course was not to go just anywhere, but to go where they might accomplish something useful."

"There is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them."

"If you are always frightened for yourself you can't act, and then life loses its purpose. You just have to tell yourself that, when you get right down to it, you don't matter all that much."

"Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore."

"We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two."

"What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from... For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endeavors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift."

"You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves."

"“Not safe?” I asked, all innocence. “Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.”"

"We have a saying where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness."

"If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward."

"It’s easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it’s real, when the moment comes to choose."

"“Now I’m going to make you angry again.” “Really?” I asked, drily. “Aren’t you getting tired of that?”"

"Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those with emotions."

"Her respectful tone sounded almost sincere."

"You don’t like me saying that, but here’s the truth: luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one generally doesn’t have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience."

"What, after all, was the point of civilization if not the well-being of citizens?"

"You might also see why it seemed a bit odd, to Radchaai ears, to hear someone who believed gravity wells were the land of the dead call people superstitious for worshiping a lizard."

"I don’t confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality."

"People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren’t quite so simple."

"“You may learn a few things,” she said. “And that’s always good.”"

"Gazing at those beautiful stars, Bailey realized that nothing mattered to them. All the achievements of humankind were insignificant. Love and hate, death and life, honor and dishonor, knowledge or ignorance—what did any of that matter in the face of this austere and heartless splendor?"

"“You’ve passed the first test of leadership. You’ve disagreed with me.”"

"Piero was the sort of person that every religion needs but no religion likes. Thoughtful, rational, scientific. He asked questions and did not accept the easy answers on faith."

"What do you do when you are falling? Do you reach out and try to grab for support? If you aren’t careful, you will pull others down with you. Unless you are very careful."

"“Let it be. These things have a way of becoming clear over time,“ Gyro said. And then he shrugged. “Or not. In the end, it doesn’t really matter does it?”"

"“Imaginary solutions work quite well, as long as you realize that problems are also imaginary.”"

"Gyro smiled. “There’s an old pataphysical saying: ‘An adventure is only an inconvenience, rightly considered.’ Adventure is never convenient. And everything is an adventure, if you take the right perspective.” “So everything is inconvenient?” Bailey grumbled. “Oh, yes. That’s exactly it! Life is terribly inconvenient, which makes it quite entertaining.”"

"Metaphor is reality once removed."

"Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don’t like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can’t talk back. That’s not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We’re a slow-moving lot. We look at a change in pottery technology that took a hundred years and say that’s pretty quick. We’re used to taking our time."