Euan > Euan's Quotes

“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us-mounts and riders both-could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out. Understand, then, that though I would not say I privately engaged in metaphysical speculation as we rode through the reedy approaches to the river, I certainly meditated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?”
― Angela Carter

“One has serious reason to doubt one is as sane as one had hoped.”
― John Gardner

“This Citybis so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. As long as it lasts, no one in the world can be strong or happy.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“The fact is that every writer *creates* his own precursors. His work modifies our perception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“... all the outpourings of the English-speaking presses, accumulated and preserved in a pickle of democracy, so that classics stood on the same shelf with books that, though they deserved to be remembered, were not; and these with books justly forgotten; and others that ought never to have seen the light of print.”
― Gene Wolfe, Peace

“The city: grime, glamor, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete. Intractable, it rises from nature, like proud Babel, only to lie arthwart our will, astride our being. Or so it often seems. Yet immanent in that gritty structure is another: invisible, imaginary, made of dreams and desire, agent of all our transformations. It is that other city I want here to invoke…Immaterial, that city in-formed history from the start, molding human space and time ever since time and space molded them selves to the wagging tongue. IHAB HASSAN, Cities of Mind, Urban Words”
― Samuel R. Delany, Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

“I went into the tent, and lay staring into the shadows until sleep picked me up, and I flew with burning fire-feathered wings across the black cliffs of my doubt.

Below, a great stretch of water crinkled moonlight. I soared above it, and away to the south, saw a shoreline scattered with broken, bone-white cities. I wheeled toward them, the wing-thrust in my ears like a wind-drum, beating with my heart. Over the black bright rollers of the sea, where the froth burst silver on the faces of the dunes and the bastions of crested rocks like the shattered bodies of dragons, eagles, giants.”
― Tanith Lee, The Birthgrave