James Tiptree, Jr. Quotes

“I can't help what people think sounds male or female.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“Incredible how the top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the underdog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning—but for god's sake don't teach them anything!—and both cowardly and ferocious. […] The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with their place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators. […] Once I learned the tune I stopped believing the words—about anybody.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“I find, in all the writings of women, a strange muffled quality, as if the living word, as it left the lips, had been hastily suppressed and another substituted, one which would conform to some pattern imposed from without. […] I am trying, from the living urge of my own life, to force open channels of communication so far mostly closed. […] To press out naked into the dark spaces of life is perhaps to build a small part of the path along which others like myself wish to travel.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“women could never be in the space program, since in zero G a woman’s breasts would bounce and keep the men from concentrating.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“This was just too improbable, a man who didn’t think he deserved a prize.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“[...] the day when male writers can speak for women is speeding by. Fast.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“We are strangers; we write as individual captive Martians.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“I never sexually 'let down' much with people—male or female. Perhaps because to me, as an only and over-loved child, I associated caresses with the threat of possession. And my yearning for love with vulnerability.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“The newsletter’s editor, Ted Cogswell, illustrated an issue with pictures of naked women—intended, he said, as a joke. Suzy Charnas informed him that this kind of “joke” was aggression disguised as humor.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“A big, complicated, fast marriage like ours is just like those big fast delicate motors—it’s 25% of the time in the shop.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

“Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.”
― Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon