David Agranoff > David's Quotes

“There is no greater wrecking ball to the planet than the industries that turn animals into food. No single choice that we make has a bigger or more positive impact.”
― David Agranoff, The Vegan Guide to Portland

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
― Philip K. Dick

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“to travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other”
― John Brunner, The Infinitive of Go

“Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred. ”
― Clive Barker

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”
― Clive Barker

“With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.”
― Clifford D. Simak, City

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“That which is imagined can never be lost.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Our economic order is tightly woven around the exploitation of animals, and while it may seem easy to dismiss concern about animals as the soft-headed mental masturbation of people who really don't understand oppression and the depths of actual human misery, I hope to get you to think differently about suffering and pain, to convince you that animals matter, and to argue that anyone serious about ending domination and hierarchy needs to think critically about bringing animals into consideration.”
― Bob Torres, Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights

“I don't think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief--if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer and the monolithic elements of the culture, such as religion.”
― Brian Evenson

“He reached down and picked up the ear and threw it at a stray. The dog sniffed it, snapped it up and wandered off down the street, chewing.”
― Michael Kazepis, Long Lost Dog of It

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
― Philip José Farmer

“The City was built on their blood, Katch said “It’s in the foundations of the buildings. The sap of the trees. The oxygen that mosses excrete.”
― Sam J. Miller, The Blade Between

“They made this town theirs. And their magic is powerful. Their wards have held for almost two centuries.”
― Sam J. Miller, The Blade Between

“Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile. And the automobile paved the way for more profound – more inward- inner dependencies upon Television and then robots, and finally the ultimate and predictable conclusion of it all: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind…It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“A more ambitious bet would be to learn from what we imagine a more mature civilization might have attempted. To take the small scientific leap and allow the possibility ‘Oumuamua was extraterrestrial technology is to give humanity the small nudge toward thinking like a civilization that could have left a lightsail buoy for our solar system to run into. It is to nudge us not just to imagine alien spacecraft but to contemplate the construction of our own such craft.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

“instructive to view things from ‘Oumuamua’s vantage point. From that object’s perspective, it was at rest and our solar system slammed into it. Or, in a way that works both metaphorically and, maybe, literally, perhaps ‘Oumuamua was like a buoy resting in the expanse of the universe, and our solar system was like a ship that ran into it at high speed.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

“A rough-hewn, squarish tunnel, maybe eight feet on a side, carved through dark stone, stretched ahead of him curving off to the left. Smokeless flames flickered in sconces spaced along the walls.
Okay, first question: Who lit the sconces? And second what were the flames feeding on?
What did it matter? In sharp contrast to the blah, semi-modern characterless buildings on the surface, this tunnel looked ancient. And that gave Frankie hope. Because it might lead somewhere else.
Was it unreasonable to hope it led back to Manhatten-his Manhatten? Most certainly. Did he have a better route to follow? No.
With the manuscript of the Great American Novella clutched to his chest, P.Frank Winslow started walking.”
― F.Paul Wilson

“We know what we do; the engines that eat us up-this is what science fiction has been saying (among other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither-despite the hostility of culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of its readers-neither will science fiction.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Science Fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effect of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Whatever happens to science fiction, it would not exist at all if it had not been given a name and a medium for this, if we are not led to praise Gernsbeck, we must entomb him with honor. He was a crook, old Hugo, but he made all of us crooks possible.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Modern” science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloombury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90% of the writing and editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other’s material, and so on. For a field which was conceptually based on expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes trying hard not to smile. A young man’s intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under real ones.

Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn’t Campbell care what all the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him?”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“More than two decades later we know that American Science Fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack; it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while. (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned…Over a thousand titles labeled “science fiction” have been published every year since 1978.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Certainly, forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties, H L Gold, Fred Phol, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and doom, and in the sixties, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins