Sam J. Miller

I used to imagine Better was a place you could get to. A moment when I would look around and see that Everything Was Fine. But that’s not how this works. Being better isn’t a battle you fight and win. Feeling okay is a war, one that lasts your whole life, and the only way to win is to keep on fighting.”

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortunate on. Whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals. Instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart.

The greatest power comes from love, from knowing who you are and standing proudly in it.

The strongest people aren’t the ones who are born strong. They’re the ones who know what it’s like to be weak, and have a reason to get stronger. The ones who’ve been hurt. Who’ve had things they love taken from them. The ones with something to fight for.

Congratulations! You have acquired one human body. This was a poor decision, but it is probably too late for you to do anything about it. Life, alas, has an extremely strict return policy.

Alix E. Harrow

The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.

I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.

May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.

Arkady Martine

So much of who we are is what we remember and retell.

Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.

I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.” Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.” “How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.

Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.

The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there's power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power.

Is that why you stare at the stars?” he asked. “Are you searching for beauty or dreaming with your eyes wide open?

He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams.

And that was that. You don't get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it back together, pretending it never knotted and tore, when it did and you know it did.

There was sadness in her, of course, but she didn't wish to crack like fine china either. She could not wither away. In the world of the living, one must live. And had this not been her wish? To live. Truly live.

Ah, there is none more fearful of thieves than the one who has stolen something, and a kingdom is no small something.

The things you name grow in power.

Look at you, like the dawn. You can't understand, of course, but one day you'll want to be new again. You'll wish to return to this moment of perfection when you were the embodiment of all promises.

Jack Williamson

I'm a strict materialist - but the police are brutal materialists.

Her long body stiffened against him. Her cool fingers tightened in his shaggy fur, and her bare, clinging heels dug deep into his heaving flanks. She was sweet against him, and the clear logic of this new life conquered the dreary conventions of that old, dim existence where he had walked in bitter death.

And there would come up from the sea its voice; and the sea has no voice, but mysteriously touches the strings within the soul of a man, so that the soul speaks in its own way, each soul lifting its peculiar message.

Your danger is something other than death, and uglier. Because she will try to change you—to arouse something in you that should never be awakened.

The trouble began when the first witch was hounded and stoned to death, by the first savage man. It will go on till the last witch is dead. Always, everywhere, men must follow that old Biblical law: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Clifford D. Simak

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.

Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

Fritz Leiber

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.

There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.

There we were, a small bunch of rather bright and fortunate young people, thinking ourselves somehow special and exceptional, but really very naive.

I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help.

He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.

Samuel R. Delany

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. 

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully...

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

C. J. Cherryh

Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!

It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly.

A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding...and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this.

Jane leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling. At the traditional location of God, no matter what the planet.

But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.

Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.

Jane Yolen

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.

Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.

'Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.

A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?

You can only chase a butterfly for so long.

'Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the ones that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.

Touch magic. Pass it on.