What you can’t pay back you pay forward.
If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn’t be so damn ineffable.
I am reading The Lord of the Rings. I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey. When I put it down to this, I feel as if I am also waiting with Pippin for the echoes of that stone down the well.
There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books There’s interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.
It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.
Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world’s only realist landscape painter.
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn’t subject to scientific analysis, and it’s not supposed to be real but it’s pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.
You know, class is like magic. There’s nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it’s real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen.
One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.
I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
It’s wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.
Magic isn’t inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.
You can’t do magic with books unless they’re very special copies.
All farms are much alike everywhere, and all wild places have their own beauty.
If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.
There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.
I’ve always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you’re not thinking about them, but they’re hard to spot when you’re searching for them.
I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
I love the train. Sitting here I feel connected to the last time I sat here, and the train to London too. It is in-between, suspended; and in rapid motion towards and away from, it is also poised between. There’s a magic in that, not a magic you can work, a magic that’s just there, giving a little colour and exhilaration to everything.