Greg > Greg's Quotes

“One voice whispered Beloved. She spread her colors on the starshine to embrace this land he had given her, and there were no shadows to darken the Fire soaring across the sand. Only light, only joy.

No one heard Elisel scream. Only the dragons saw her rise into the night sky like an arrow, mute after that one keening wail. It was two days before she returned to Skybowl.

Long before that, they found Sioned.”
― Melanie Rawn, Skybowl

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Never put off writing until you are better at it.”
― Gary Henderson

“And once upon a time I wondered: Is writing epic fantasy not somehow a betrayal? Did I not somehow do a disservice to my own reality by paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men?

But. Epic fantasy is not merely what Tolkien made it.

This genre is rooted in the epic — and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there which feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs. The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage. I haven’t even begun to explore the non-African stuff. So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible… how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building-block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?

And how dare I disrespect that history, profane all my ancestors’ suffering and struggles, by giving up the freedom to imagine that they’ve won for me.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“a bullet without a body is a song without ears.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Where I sat looking out the window one summer night from the fifth floor of our building, and the air was warm and sweet like it is now, and there were the low voices of young couples, their Converses and Air Force Ones tapping against each other on the fire escapes as they worked to make the body speak its other tongues, the sound of matches, or flames sparked from lighters the shape and shine of 9mms or Colt .45s, which was how we turned death into a joke, how we reduced fire to the size of cartoon raindrops, then sucked them through cigarillo tips, like myths.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“tenderness depends on how little the world touches you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“one night when I was little, I woke to a blizzard outside. I was five or six and didn’t know things ended. I thought the snow would continue to the sky’s brim—then beyond, touching god’s fingertips as he dozed in his reading chair, the equations scattered across the floor of his study. That by morning we would all be sealed inside a blue-white stillness and no one would have to leave. Ever.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous