ReadBecca > ReadBecca's Quotes

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without awareness that I'm carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.”
― Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“you feel like a field of sugar canes after the harvest—burnt out, all cutting edges with no sweetness left inside.”
― Aliette de Bodard, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 69, June 2012

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“When asked to "define the difference between fantasy and science fiction," I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into another. Definitions are for grammar, not literature, I say, and boxes are for bones. But of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paper—I work on paper) you get purple, something else again.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“Ward: Which would you rather have, a National Book Award or a Hugo?
Le Guin: Oh, a Nobel, of course.
Ward: They don't give Nobel Awards in fantasy.
Le Guin: Maybe I can do something for peace.”
― Ursula K Le Guin

“I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“It is our Puritanism, insisting that discipline means repression or punishment, which confuses the subject. To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but to train it - to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful, whether it is a peach tree or a human mind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“[T]he status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“For those who seek allegory, it must be maddening. (It must be allegory! Of course Frodo is Christ! - or is Gollum Christ?) for those whose grasp on reality is so tenuous that they crave ever-increasing doses of "realism" in their reading, it offers nothing - unless, perhaps, a shortcut to the looney bin.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for generalizations.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“To free them, to protect them, we must be savages. So give me evil. Give me darkness. Make me the bloodydamn devil if we can bring even the faintest ray of light.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“He always thinks because I’m reading, I’m not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Have you ever seen a chicken filled with a manifestation of evil?"

Trilgor shook his head. "Can't say I have."

"It's an evil most fowl.”
― Ashe Armstrong, A Demon in the Desert

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Yes! I'm me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am!”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“They think written words are even more powerful,’ whispered the toad. ‘They think all writing is magic. Words worry them. See their swords? They glow blue in the presence of lawyers.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“Miss Tick sniffed. 'You could say this advice is priceless,' she said. 'Are you listening?'
'Yes,' said Tiffany.
'Good. Now ... if you trust in yourself ...'
'Yes?'
'... and believe in your dreams ...'
'Yes?'
'... and follow your star ...' Miss Tick went on.
'Yes?'
'... you'll still get beaten by people who spent THEIR time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant... If I don't help them, who will?”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky