The Fox Woman Quotes

“I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things.

For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities.

But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Adventures are what happens when an event is flawed, a mark of imperfection.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Love and memory and thought and dream ~
My favorite poems have never been written in words.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Waiting required a future to wait for: a falsehood. I know now that there is only now. I remember things that happened months (or what is years?) ago: old -worn-out nows. The future happens, but it is always shaped from a series of nows.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“This is the gift of humanity: that it is claimed by the self. None of us...are human unless and until we claim it for ourselves. But nothing can stop that claiming - not the eight million gods nor the spirits nor ghosts. Nothing but ourselves, anyway.
And our lives become the poems we were born to tell.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Humans assign words to things and pretend the words are adequate.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“I say this and it is short and sharp, without elegance, like a bark; but I have no idea how else to start. I am only a fox: I have no elegances of language.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Jealousy, like poetry, is incomprehensible to me.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman