Ron > Ron's Quotes

“The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"--as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“When asked to "define the difference between fantasy and science fiction," I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into another. Definitions are for grammar, not literature, I say, and boxes are for bones. But of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paper—I work on paper) you get purple, something else again.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“But she was too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female profession generally available.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Abel Becket had never seen as much of his wife's breasts as Mrs. Loring saw fit to present to the world.”
― Bernard Cornwell, Redcoat

“He bared his teeth, his voice an angry hiss. "I do what the hell I like."

The dramatic effect was spoiled slightly when he slumped sideways and was violently sick all over his lovely new coat.”
― Anna Smith Spark, The Court of Broken Knives

“I remember every word ever said to me." That was a lie. Who would want that? Most of it I delete from permanent memory.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head

“But who's ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Butterflies understand the desert well. That’s why they move this way and that. They’re always Holding Conversation with the land. They talk as much as they listen. It’s in the desert’s language that you call the butterflies.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

“It wasn’t as though they had a second Earth to use as a control. History itself was a massive n = 1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“Elend: I kind of lost track of time…
Breeze: For two hours?
Elend: There were books involved.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant

“Just because some of what led Earth to this crisis is our fault, yours mine, doesn't mean we can't still do real good. We're still here. Alive. We have the ability to act, and choose, and achieve. That's real. Even if it seems dwarfed by past mistakes, those mistakes aren't a negative number, they don't cancel out the good things we do now, don't make an insurmountable pit we have to climb back out of to start at zero. We can do good, and our pasts don't take that possibility away, not while we still live and breathe. And try.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“As he walks with the crowd, he understands what he had forgotten: that a march is not just a voice against violence and trauma, but also a reminder that even in a cause that is stacked against them, no one is alone.”
― Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master & Commander

“Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behaviour tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is. Or occasionally: It is raining. I do not like it.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason--call it biophilia, call it care for God's creation, call it heart stopping fear--people are reluctant to be the asteroid.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“when the government fines corporations, rather than sending executives to jail, it amounts to “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

“My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. ”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Here's the real point: Paranoia has a physics to it, and even with something as insubstantial as paranoia, over time it gains substance, has weight. Secret societies are the result of paranoia, not the cause.”
― Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters

“Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message