Ray > Ray's Quotes

“The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.”
― Alan Garner

“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
― Alan Garner, The Owl Service

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday’s love is part of today’s and the confidence in tomorrow’s love is also part of today’s. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die — I almost believe, rationalist though I am — that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.”
― Isaac Asimov, It's Been a Good Life

“He also said, "the soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday's love is part of today's and the confidence in tomorrow's love is also part of today's. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die-I almost believe, rationalist though I am-that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed."
And he also wrote: "At various times of life, we find ourselves with a handful of blocks of different sizes and shapes, out of which we can build some aspect of life, and it behooves us to build it as beautifully as we can ...”
― Isaac Asimov, It's Been a Good Life

“He also said, "I suppose there are people who are so `lucky' that they are not touched by phantoms and are not troubled by fleeting memory and know not nostalgia and care not for the ache of the past and are spared the feather-hit of the sweet, sweet pain of the lost, and I am sorry for them-for to weep over what is gone is to have had something prove worth the weeping.”
― Isaac Asimov, It's Been a Good Life

“Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories,’ said Lord Dunsany.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“Without our stories we are incomplete.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“I don’t know any creators of fictions who start writing with nothing but a blank page. (They may exist. I just haven’t met any.) Mostly you have something. An image, or a character. And mostly you also have either a beginning, a middle or an end. Middles are good to have, because by the time you reach the middle you have a pretty good head of steam up; and ends are great. If you know how it ends, you can just start somewhere, aim, and begin to write (and, if you’re lucky, it may even end where you were hoping to go). There may be writers who have beginnings, middles and ends before they sit down to write. I am rarely of their number.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“You can fuck around with the rules as much as you want to – after you know what the rules are. You can be Picasso after you know how to paint.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“back then, fairy tales were for adults. Children listened to them and enjoyed them, but children were not the primary audience, no more than they were the intended audience of Beowulf, or The Odyssey. J. R. R. Tolkien said, in a robust and fusty analogy, that fairy tales were like the furniture in the nursery – it was not that the furniture had originally been made for children: it had once been for adults and was consigned to the nursery only when the adults grew tired of it and it became unfashionable.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“started writing Stardust in 1994, but mentally timeslipped about seventy years to do it. The mid-1920s seemed like a time when people enjoyed writing those sorts of things, before there were fantasy shelves in the bookshops, before trilogies and books ‘in the great tradition of The Lord of the Rings’. This, on the other hand, would be in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. All I was certain of was that nobody had written books on computers back in the 1920s, so I bought a large book of unlined pages, and the first fountain pen I had owned since my schooldays and a copy of Katharine Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies. I filled the pen and began.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“I was fortunate in having Charles Vess, to my mind the finest fairy artist since Arthur Rackham, as the illustrator of Stardust, and many times I found myself writing scenes – a lion fighting a unicorn, a flying pirate ship – simply because I wanted to see how Charles would paint them.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“The King of Elfland’s Daughter, on the other hand, is a tale of pure imagination (and bricks without straw, as Dunsany himself pointed out, are more easily made than imagination without memories).”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“Sometimes people would ask me about Tolkien, and I would explain that I did not, and do not, think of The Lord of the Rings as English Fantasy but as High Fantasy.) It was a novel about the reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous, in which the world of faerie and the world of men are, perhaps, not as divided as they appear, but might simply be different ways of addressing the same thing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“A cosmic perspective actually strengthens our concerns about what happens here and now, because it offers a vision of just how prodigious life’s future potential could be. Earth’s biosphere is the outcome of more than four billion years of Darwinian selection: the stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. But life’s future could be more prolonged than its past. In the aeons that lie ahead, even more marvellous diversity could emerge, on and beyond Earth. The unfolding of intelligence and complexity could still be near its cosmic beginnings.”
― Martin J. Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning

“It may not be absurd hyperbole—indeed, it may not even be an overstatement—to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and now. I think the odds are no better than fifty–fifty that our present civilisation on Earth will survive to the end of the present century. Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life (not just on Earth, but perhaps far beyond it, too). Or in contrast, through malign intent, or through misadventure, twenty-first century technology could jeopardise life’s potential, foreclosing its human and posthuman future. What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter. 2”
― Martin J. Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning

“The Internet offers access, in principle, to an unprecedented variety of opinions and information. Nonetheless, it could narrow understanding and sympathies rather than broaden them: some people may choose to stay closeted within a cybercommunity of the likeminded.”
― Martin J. Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning

“IN HIS BOOK THE FUTURE OF LIFE, E.O. Wilson sets the scene with an image that highlights the complex fragility of “Spaceship Earth”: “The totality of life, known as the biosphere to scientists and creation to the theologians, is a membrane of organisms wrapped around Earth so thin it cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered.”
― Martin J. Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning

“Humanity’s long-term impact on Earth depends both on population and on lifestyle. WWF, a conservation group, has published estimates of the land area, or “footprint,” needed to support each person: it concludes that an area equivalent to “almost three planets” would be required to support the world population with the lifestyle and consumption pattern that it predicts for 2050. This particular calculation is controversial and perhaps somewhat tendentious: for instance, the “footprint” includes the area of forest needed to soak up the carbon dioxide arising from each person’s energy use, making no allowance for a shift to renewable energy sources, nor for the tenable viewpoint that modest rises in carbon dioxide levels are tolerable. Nonetheless, the world plainly could not perpetually support its entire population in the present style of middle-class Europeans and North Americans.”
― Martin J. Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning

“Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Increasing global inequalities fueled resistance to Western values. In 1960 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population earned about thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent; in 1991 the wealthiest 20 percent earned sixty-one times as much. The successes of the most highly industrialized”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Population growth accounts for much of the impact as cities have gobbled up farmland and forest land, as roads and highways have paved over more land, and as Third World farmers have cleared forest lands to eke out a living. However, during the late twentieth century it became apparent that rates of population growth were slowing throughout the world as urbanization, increasing education, and improved services simultaneously reduced the pressure to have large families and raised their cost. At present, it seems likely that global populations will level out at 9 to 10 billion toward the end of the twenty-first century.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“more and more consumers begin to expect the material living standards currently enjoyed in Europe and North America, human pressure on the environment will increase even as population growth slows.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. London: Vintage. Diamond, J. (2004). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity