It seems to me the Super-Perceptive Child Victim of Self-Pity has something in common with the Inner Child: they’re lazy. It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one.
No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for generalizations.
If the writer is a socially privileged person – particularly a White or a male or both – his imagination may have to make an intense and conscious effort to realize that people who don’t share his privileged status may read his work and will not share with him many attitudes and opinions that he has been allowed to believe or to pretend are shared by “everybody.
The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: “Subversion Through Friendliness.” It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy – instant gratification, as it were.
The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live!
I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.
I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.
Everybody, everybody in this world has a bullet in them, or whipping scars, or a leg blown off, or a dead baby in their heart,′ she said. ‘Now you’re one of us, Mr. Envoy. You’ve been through the fire.
Oh fool, oh desolation!” said the Prince of Kansas. “Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I’ll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I’ll give you a dog – in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!
Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows no boat is safe.
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
There’s one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!
Goodbye, goodbye. Fish and visitors stink after three days. Goodbye!
The sense that you are in touch with something really different – completely human and extremely understandable emotionally – but really different. That’s one of the great things novels do.
A poem of the right shape will hold a thousand truths. But it doesn’t say any of them.
One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. Back.
All stories are long,” he murmured. The Fertiliser had said something like that once. Short stories are only pieces of the long one, he had said.
Oh, you’re here already,” she said, taken by surprise and feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all.
There’s a Hainish parable of the Mirror. If the glass is whole, it reflects the whole world, but broken, it shows only fragments, and cuts the hand that holds it.