top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Myth is, after all, the neverending story."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? "Darling, what do you mean? "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay." How? By being stupid?"
"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it."
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him."
"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
Explore more quotes by Joan D. Vinge
"The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time."
"These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end."
"What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page