Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No Utopia is Utopia for everyone
Each of us has a private Austen.
Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.
Baby, high school's over. High school's never over.
I have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader.
All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.
I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.
But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.
The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't
You know, I don't think there's anything truly unforgivable. Not where there's love.
I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don't mean to complain about that.
In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'
Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.
You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.
The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.
Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.
You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.
In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.
I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.
There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science
I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.
A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.
Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.
Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.
I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.
Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.
Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.
I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.
I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
Just ask yourself, if we weren't taught to be women, what would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you're a man, and don't cheat by changing the words.)
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)
In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery.
The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?
Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.
My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.
I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I've had to write what I've wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer.
If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.
I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.
In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.
Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.
Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.
I do read all my work aloud as I'm working - this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband's retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I'm alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me.