Derek Newman-Stille > Derek's Quotes

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
― bell hooks

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”
― bell hooks

“Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“There's a time and place for everything, and I believe it’s called 'fan fiction'.”
― Joss Whedon

“To me, one quality of disability justice culture is that it is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks - because they're equally important and interdependent.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Disability Justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn't me being week or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honoured crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Fantasy is Queer. It imagines the world otherwise, and otherwise is where Queerness dwells. We, the queer, delight in our strange tales”
― Matthew Cheney, Fantasy Magazine, Issue 59, December 2015: Queers Destroy Fantasy!

“I yearned for these other worlds where magic empowers people who understood it because I wanted to change my world, my place in it. I wanted to either be more visible, seen for who I am in my entirety and respected for it... or else I wanted to be even more invisible, protected from a world that would attempt to destroy me if others knew I was unlike them. That I was other. That I was queer”
― Christopher Barzak

“Falling in love with another human is terrifying. As our language insists, romantic love is always preceded by a fall, the necessity of losing control and potentially hurting yourself in the process of connecting with another”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men.

“I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the word girl by turning it into a weapon they used to hurt me. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to hate and eventually destroy my femininity. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the extraordinary parts of myself”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men.

“We make the revolutionary history, telling the past as we have learned it mouth-to-mouth, telling the present as we see, know, and feel it in our heats and with our words.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“There are times when so much talk or writing, so many ideas seem to stand in the way, to block the awareness that for the oppressed, the exploited, the dominated, domination is not just a subject for radical discourse, for books. It is about pain – the pain of hunger, the pain of over-work, the pain of degradation and dehumanization, the pain of loneliness, the pain of loss, the pain of isolation, the pain of exile... Even before the words, we remember the pain.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“I have had the pain of fragmentation deeply impressed upon my consciousness. The alienation felt by many people who are concerned about domination – the struggle we have even to make of our words a language that can be shared, understood.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“We children were terrified by the story. We still listened to the old believers, they who were never dismissive, they who were never afriad to entertain the shadow”
― Tom Dawe, Spirited Away: Fairy stories of old Newfoundland

“When we were children, everything scared us. The harmless dragonfly, for example, was called 'the devil's darning needle.' The creature hovered all around us int he summertime, ready to sew up the ears and lips of disobedient children. To us, even a common snipe, owl, or bittern calling from the marsh, might be a voice from the other side.”
― Tom Dawe, Spirited Away: Fairy stories of old Newfoundland

“He sounded like a lot of the youth in our community, stuck between the past and the future. The true goal is finding enough of both to make your life worth living.”
― Drew Hayden Taylor, Take Us To Your Chief And Other Stories

“First Nations and science fiction don't usually go together. In fact, they could be considered rather unusual topics to mention in the same sentence, much like fish and bicycles.... To me, sci-fi was a world of possibilities. As a fan of writing, why shouldn't my fascination extend to such unconventional works? It was still writing, still literature in all its glory, but here they used different tools to explore the human condition, be they aliens, advanced technology, or other such novel approaches.... I wanted to take traditional (a buzzword in the Native community) science-fiction characteristics and filter them through an Aboriginal consciousness.”
― Drew Hayden Taylor, Take Us To Your Chief And Other Stories