Leons1701 > Leons1701's Quotes

“Murderer of Vuka and Jumadi, see now how Tugars can die.”
― William Forstchen

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

“Don’t judge a man by what he says his ideals are, judge him by what he does. Look at what the Color Prince has done. They’re wrong, Teia. They’re liars and murderers. It doesn’t mean everything we do is right. It doesn’t mean our house doesn’t need a thorough cleaning. I just don’t think we need to burn it to the ground to do it.”
― Brent Weeks, The Broken Eye

“This is why there are few prophets. We end up dead a lot. The truth is offensive to men who love darkness.”
― Brent Weeks, The Broken Eye

“This is how tyrants fall. By destroying their people, they destroy themselves.”
― Brent Weeks, The Broken Eye

“She looked at the door, and wondered if they meant it. Could she leave now? “We’ve no cowards among us,” the man said. “Good.” Teia wanted to shout, Wait! I think I might be a coward! Can I think on it a bit longer?”
― Brent Weeks, The Broken Eye

“When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?

Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.

The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.”
― China Miéville

“You misunderstand the point of a symbol of faith then." He walked towards the vampires. "You're abominations, of course it doesn't matter to you. What matters is how much it means to me.”
― Larry Correia, Monster Hunter Nemesis

“But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“I don’t know where old girl found a bikini that big, but she’s got maximum Don’t Give A Fuck mode engaged, and I’m surfing on her bitch wave.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“He’s been here one hour, but already he feels like he has never lived anywhere else. And even if he doesn’t know who he was… he knows who he is.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“And just to add insult to injury? I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Skippy the tentacle monster sends her little bigot fuckbois to harass you on the internet? Like, is that how Lovecraftian horror works now, because… I can’t…”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“She taps the Bronx. "This part of the city gets hit the hardest by everything. Gangs, real estate scams, whatever. Hard people, too, if they came through any of that . . . so in a lot of ways, this is the heart of New York. The part of itself that held on to all the attitude and creativity and toughness everybody thinks is the whole city.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Veneza is so much of what Bronca could have been, if she’d come up in a better world—and so much of what Bronca is now, because the world is still a goddamn shitshow.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“I’m alive. Oh, God. I cry for a little while. Mama’s boyfriend ain’t here to slap me and say I’m not a man for it. Daddy would’ve said it was okay—tears mean you’re alive—but Daddy’s dead. And I’m alive.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“He pretends to be less special than he is, because the world has punished him for loving himself.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Stolid, no-meat-on-Fridays Catholics. Aislyn’s strongest memory of them is Grammy telling her how she should dress and carry herself if she wanted a good husband.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“And if one tendril has turned a nosy, racist white woman into a conduit for disembodied existential evil, he doesn’t want to see what infected NYPD will become.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Money talks and bullshit walks in New York. In a lot of cities, probably—but here, the nation’s shrine to unrestricted predatory capitalism, money has nearly talismanic power. Which means that he can use it as a talisman.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“And here in this other realm she looms over him, vast and sprawling, wildly patchwork and dense. Not just older and bigger. Stronger in many ways: her arms and core are thick with muscled neighborhoods that each have their own rhythms and reputations. Williamsburg, Hasidim enclave and artist haven turned hipster ground zero. Bed Stuy (do or die). Crown Heights, where now the only riots are over seats at brunch. Her jaw is tight with the stubborn ferocity of Brighton Beach's old mobsters and the Rockaways' working-class holdouts against the brutal inevitability of rising seas. But there are spires at Brooklyn's heart, too- perhaps not as grand as his own, and maybe some of hers are actually the airy, fanciful amusement-park towers of Coney Island- but all are just as shining, just as sharp.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“But his eyes stutter over a TGI Fridays and he twitches a little, lip curling in involuntary distaste. Something about its facade feels foreign, intrusive, jarring. A tiny, cluttered shoe-repair shop next to it does not elicit the same feeling, nor does a vape shop next door. Just the chain stores that Manny sees—a Foot Locker, a Sbarro, all the sorts of stores one normally finds at a low-end suburban mall. Except these mall stores are here, in the heart of Manhattan, and their presence is… not truly harmful, but irritating. Like paper cuts, or little quick slaps to the face. The subway sign, though, feels right and real. The billboards, too, no matter what’s on them. The cabs, and flow of cars and people—all these things soothe the irritants, somehow. He draws in a deep breath that reeks of hot garbage and acrid steam belching from a manhole cover nearby, and it’s foul but it’s right.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“He blinks, then chuckles a little, relaxing as if Bronca calling a spade a spade has finally made him feel better about the whole thing. Probably gets laid a lot with that face, but no idea how to do an actual relationship. Also figures that the personification of Manhattan is two-spirit, too. She snorts a little at the thought. Maybe Stonewall was worth something after all. Anyway.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Maybe she’s a Canadian who has been driven mad by the cold and socialized medicine.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“But then you meet somebody fine at the neighborhood block party, or you go out for Vietnamese perogies or some other bizarre shit that you can't get anywhere but in this dumb-ass city, or you go see an off-off-off-Broadway fringe festival that nobody else has seen, or you have a random encounter on the subway that becomes something so special and beautiful that you'll tell your grandkids about it someday.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became