Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Not every puzzle is intended to be solved. Some are in place to test your limits. Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all.
Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone's home and backyard.
The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale.
Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.
A boomerang returns back to the person who throws it. But first, while moving in a circle, it hits its target. So does gossip.
Fantasy, at its best, is balm for the soul. But it is faulty logic to assume that balm is necessarily mind-numbing anesthesia.
The act of sharing with readers was at first too much of an intimate thing. But it evolved into an intense necessity to share.
Everything I write now might have roots in myths, often disguised,often dissolved into new multi-ethnic myths of my own making.
I've just been bitten on the neck by a vampire... mosquito. Does that mean that when the night comes I will rise and be annoying?
However I will never forget what Marion [Zimmer Bradley] did for me by accepting that first story from a stupid enthusiastic kid.
Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.
Money is like fire. It is only good when there's just the right amount of it, when it's properly contained and under your control.
The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.
Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey. At other times, it is allowing another to take yours.
I love to fool my readers, but in a good way. If you've read any of my work, there's a good chance that at some point I surprised you.
The desert is an ideal illusion of a blank slate - so much mystery in endless layers is hidden underneath its bright, pseudo-sterile surface.
Short stories are like individual jewel stones on a necklace, wonderful in themselves like standalone gleaming entities of semantic intensity.
Dangling a carrot in front of a donkey—or anyone else for that matter—is not nice, and not fair, unless you eventually plan to give it up to them.
One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that I seem to be fascinated as a writer with the notion that we already have all that we need.
True balm [of fantasy] takes away the painful irritation of life and simply heals, allowing one to begin anew. And that is what fantasy can do for us.
Close your eyes and turn your face into the wind. Feel it sweep along your skin in an invisible ocean of exultation. Suddenly, you know you are alive.
Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!
Because without such a reprieve we cannot pause and regroup and with the newfound strength go on to initiate that very change which is sorely needed by all.
It's easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.
Neither sugar nor salt tastes particularly good by itself. Each is at its best when used to season other things. Love is the same way. Use it to "season" people.
I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.
A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.
Fantasy plunders the well of our deepest selves for existent truth instead of creating new truths out of the illusory fabric of recent events or the flow of society.
My brand of fantasy is completely devoid of the traditional notions of magic as ritual. Instead I see the fantastic as a meta-layer of existence beyond the real world.
Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.
Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea. Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink. Is the glass part full or part empty? Take another sip. And now?
A fine glass vase goes from treasure to trash, the moment it is broken. Fortunately, something else happens to you and me. Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.
A made-up proverb from Dreams of the Compass Rose says, "In the desert, the only god is a well." I love exploring the intensity of such juxtaposition, the dangerous edge.
Seems to me that there is no better way to experience the depth of loss than after the fact. No more powerful instrument of imbuing value in an object than parting with it.
The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.
A related recurring theme is the exploration of how we take for granted the things in our immediate environment that are common and ordinary. Existential blindness, of sorts.
Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder. Another is Deity. The choice to be a fool is yours.
We often engage the defense mechanism of tunnel vision, just to keep ourselves focused on our daily lives. This makes us terribly jaded in our perception of what is really around us.
I sat down and wrote a short story in two weeks and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. And Marion bought "Wound On The Moon" .My first sale and my first pro sale rolled into one.
The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air. It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies.
If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.
Instructions are never included. They vary with the strength of your ability to see, the measure of your selective blindness, the limits of your mercy, and the intensity of your desire.
A woman is human. She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man. Likewise, she is never less. Equality is a given. A woman is human.
Here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.
Our world is so bursting-full of natural wonder that we are all experiencing a sensory overload. We are no longer perceiving all of Ú the details, just the ones that immediately interest us.
Love - not dim and blind but so far-seeing that it can glimpse around corners, around bends and twists and illusion; instead of overlooking faults love sees through them to the secret inside.
I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.
And it is a quiet terrible thing, too, to discover the value of love this way [after loss] - when the object of love is no longer there, when love dies or goes away or changes. When it is too late.
Even for the people who are color-blind to any degree, I believe their experience would also be affected [ in Lords of Rainbow ] if everyone else too only perceived the world in colorless monochrome.
I usually focus on the whole group of characters in any given work-in-progress, and as a result they become particularly dear to me as I delve into their innermost motivations and live out their lives.