Joan D. Vinge Quotes
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Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
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Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?
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Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.
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Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
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Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
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The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.
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What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.
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Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.
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Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything...and not doing it only because you can.
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Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.
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A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.
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In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
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As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
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There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares...heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.
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Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.
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Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
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For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.
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I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
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All [people] are intolerant.... Only they're intolerant of different things.
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Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.
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But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.
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Theres no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.
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It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you...just let me love you now.
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Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far.
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But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?" "Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.
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Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.
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Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.
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Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.
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What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.
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Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
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