The (children's) book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions – the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity – and conceals the contradiction by the further pretense that the characters are not human beings at all.
I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy.
... all sorts of wonderful things got washed up on the beach – crates of clothes and cutlery and children’s toys, boxes of engine parts and television screens and electrical wires like tangled snakes in the water. I found them fascinating, like relics from a distant time, even though I knew it was us who lived in the past.
The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in two directions. Half make a black storm of moving, twisting shapes. The other half forms a white-as-snow moving cloud. The ranks are divided.
Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they’re grounded in solid human emotion and experience.
The only magic that's left in the world right now is the magic that we make ourselves, deliberately. You're not going to stumble over enchantment by chance. You have to be open to it, looking for it, and when you first think you might have glimpsed it, you have to will it into your life with every machination available to you.
Azerowut, I must tend to an urgently urgent business and a business that is urgent most urgently. Watch over my tent with extreme care and care that is caring in the extreme, and do not, under any circumstantial circumstances, allow anyone and his brother to be within an uncomfortably uncomfortable distance of her door. --Master Kwadile
Man leave the past in the past. That's where it belongs. The trouble with addicts is that they carry bad memories around with them - like old luggage. And in that luggage that's where they carry their blueprint for living. You got to decide what's worth keeping, and then set the rest of it on the curb for the garbage.-Joseph
Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of an awful grin on his face. It was a grin that said he knew I'd come around. Sooner or later, I'd fall in line.
I felt that I was breaking him apart as much as I was breaking myself apart. I imagined that pain in his mercury eyes and the silent tears whispered their way down my cheeks. Silent tears are the worst kind, the kind that shows the most pain and they were all I had left. The Fates had left me cold, with half a heart and a torn apart soul.
*You are not yet in the Emerald Dream. First, you must remove your earthly shell...* the voice in his head instructed. *As you reach the state of sleep, you will slip your body off as you would a coat. Start from your heart and mind, for they are the links that most bind you to the mortal plane. See? This is how it is done...* - Chapter 4
The feelings and the memories and the perceptions in me are my own, they are terrible and secret and if I can turn them out, if I can display them on canvas… or even on my skin if I must…” He turned his head and looked at her. “Then they are special. Do you see? I create from my secrets, from the halls in my soul.
A geas was a contract with the goddess of Fate. Sometimes one was born indentured, other times it was bestowed upon one as a curse. Because if one did not fulfill the terms of one's geas, one died. It was old magic, the magic of the gods, spoken in the tongues of those who controlled the dragons—and it was supposed to be extinct.
1919Voglio essere cremata, le mie ceneri mischiate alla polvere da sparo di un fuoco d’artificio e sparate nel cielo sulle note di “My way” di Sid Vicious, così che amici e colleghi, ormai imbottiti d’alcol come stoppini di una molotov, esclamino estasiati: “Alexandra Zahradnik ha fatto il botto”.
People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.
