For many years, I’ve been posting quotes from various sources with the hashtag #CommonplaceBook—an old-fashioned term for a sort of scrapbook of stuff that the compiler wants to remember or track.

Eventually, it occurred to me that it might be nice to put all of those things in one place. So here they are—about five hundred of them, adding up to nearly 40,000 words.

Some of these are here because I found them funny; some because I found them interesting or well-said; some because I agree with them; some because I disagree with them; some just because I want to be able to find them again in the future. Don’t read too much into the presence of anything here.

(Also, there are thousands of lines and phrases and quotes and sayings that I love but haven’t included here for one reason or another. Don’t read too much into the absence of anything here.)

These quotes are in alphabetical order by author’s full name. (Thus mostly by author’s given/personal name.) Movie quotes are listed by movie title. Unknown authors are listed under U for unknown.

The formatting here is somewhat inconsistent, for no particular reason.

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A

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“They always act disoriented; that is their way.”

—Aaron Schuman

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Adam Becker on who gets to set the terms for debate about the future:

“[Tech billionaires’] visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”

—quoted in an Ars Technica interview

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Adam Becker on LLMs:

“A large language model is never going to do a job that a human does as well as they could do it, but that doesn’t mean that they’re never going to replace humans, because, of course, decisions about whether or not to replace a human with a machine aren’t based on the actual performance of the human or the machine. They’re based on what the people making those decisions believe to be true about those humans and those machines. So they are already taking people’s jobs, not because they can do them as well as the people can, but because the executive class is in the grip of a mass delusion about them.”

—from an Ars Technica interview

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“So here we have someone who was never on a [revolutionary] subcommittee, or robbed a bank, or even fiddled his taxes, but the [oppressive regime’s] algorithm looked into his data footprint and electronic pareidolia did the rest. If you program your computers to expect wrongdoing, then they’ll most certainly find it.”

—from the novel Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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“They talked about it in low tones; and their hushed baritones formed a queer, deep-throated background[…]”

—A. E. van Vogt, “Recruiting Station” (1942)

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“Multi-track recording equipment allowed producers to add to, erase and electronically alter sound during the recording process, enabling composers to use the recording studio as another instrument rather than as a method of strict documentation.”

—from “Renaming That Tune: Audio Collage, Parody and Fair Use” (1992), by Alan Korn

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“there does not exist a musical equivalent to literature’s use of quotation marks.”

—from “Renaming That Tune: Audio Collage, Parody and Fair Use” (1992), by Alan Korn

Korn adds a quote in a footnote:

“[j]azz musicians do not wiggle two fingers of each hand in the air, as lecturers sometimes do, when cross-referencing during their extemporizations, as on most instruments this would present some technical difficulties.”

—Composer John Oswald, as quoted in footnote 88 of the Korn article

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From Miracleman, by Alan Moore (1982 or so):

Like a kite that has lost its war with the wind I hang crucified upon the sky … suspended between the soil and the stars, between heaven and earth, between the angels and the apes.

There is no-one like me.

I’m Miracleman.

Gravity is a sullen giant who snatches irritably at my heels.

The hurricane is my mistress. I slide my body across her arctic vectors and her sigh is an ecstasy of birds.

Her nails rake my back and she howls her bitterness, begging me to stay, pleading with me to deny the dark and jealous planet that waits below.

But I can’t. I can’t.

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“Most religions of the past have failed by expecting Nature to conform with their ideals of proper conduct.”

—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, introduction, p. XIX, footnote 1

I like this not so much for the religion aspect as for the phrase “expecting Nature to conform with their ideals of proper conduct,” which seems like it applies to a lot of things that we do.

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“There is no more potent means than Art of calling forth true Gods to visible appearance.”

—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. 82

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“There is nothing in the universe which does not influence every other thing in one way or another.”

—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. 174

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—from Loki: Agent of Asgard #1, written by Al Ewing

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A conversation between 3-year-old supergenius Valeria Richards and human lie-detector Verity Willis:

—from issue 7 of Loki: Agent of Asgard, written by Al Ewing

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—from issue 7 of Loki: Agent of Asgard, written by Al Ewing

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—from issue 7 of Loki: Agent of Asgard, written by Al Ewing

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“in their radical aspect, [stories] alert us to the limitations of how we presently live and who we take ourselves to be, and lead us on toward what we are not yet.”

—from The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence, by Alexei and Cory Panshin, p. ix

(The original line said myths rather than stories, but I feel like “stories” is probably not too far off from what they meant.)

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An example of compact characterization:

First-person narrator describes having received a particular book (from her father) for her sixth birthday. As she looked through the book, she was (as her adult narrator self puts it) “pretending to be a little more excited than I actually was because even at six I knew my parents needed a lot of protecting.”

—Alix E. Harrow, A Spindle Splintered

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Out-of-context advice from an old movie, still relevant today:

—from All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930

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his mind is always

leaping off

in new directions, as if

the whole point

is to cross life’s river of confusion

on the stones

of metaphor…

—Amy Belding Brown, “Thinking About Thoreau”

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“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

—Anatole France, from The Red Lily (1894)

(Original French: “[…] la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.” I don’t know which translator provided the English version that I quoted above.)

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“In its beginnings, the tango was so scandalous that no respectable woman would dance it, and one would see two men […] dancing together on street corners[…]”

—Andrew Hurley, notes on Borges’s story “Man on Pink Corner,” in Borges’s Collected Fictions, pp. 529–530

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“I am the managing editor of the academic journal Extrapolation, though most of the time it feels like I’m the just-coping editor.”

—Andrew M. Butler, introducing the Bodily Futures papers session at Worldcon 2024

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“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

—Angela Y. Davis

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“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

—from Angela Y. Davis’s book Are Prisons Obsolete?, ch. 1

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“An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why ‘criminals’ have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category ‘lawbreakers’ is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another.”

—from Angela Y. Davis’s book Are Prisons Obsolete?, ch. 6

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🎵 Things would be so different

If they were not as they are!

—Anna Russell, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan Opera”

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Anne McCaffrey acknowledging fandom in 1983, in the Author‘s Note at the beginning of Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern:

For readers who have extrapolated themselves and their wishes onto Pern, I have probably NOT written the adventure you hoped might be presented between these covers. With all the best intentions in the world, I doubt that I could write such a broadly pleasing, all-encompassing, wish-fulfilling novel. In a roundabout way, that is a compliment to you, the reader, not a fault in me, for you have put more of yourself on Pern than I could ever imagine for your sake. I appreciate your enthusiasms and I also appreciate the list of dragon names which have been sent to me.

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“It does seem so discouragingly sad to me: rooms get dusty and clothes always need mending and flowers fade and teeth decay. It’s always like that.”

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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“There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that […] our children [are] busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole [people] who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.”

—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, pp. 56–57

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Advice for writers:

“Hang in there kids, and one day you too might realize a mangled, stunted, mocking facsimile of your dreams.”

—Ann Sterzinger

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“The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.”

—Ann Strong, Minn. Tribune, 1895

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Protag is upset with something a TV commentator has just said:

“He issued a two-syllable instruction which the commentator would have found difficult to carry out.”

—Anthony Boucher, circumlocuting (in “The Other Inauguration,” 1953)

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Anthony Burgess on the fact that Kubrick left out the denouement of the British version of A Clockwork Orange from the movie:

People wrote to me about this—indeed much of my later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention—while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanour. Life is, of course, terrible.

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From Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead:

“There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere […]. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message […]. [Civilians] will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible […], but [some members of the military] watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. […] Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man[…]”

—pp. 6–7

(Many people vehemently disagree with this. Swofford was speaking from personal experience, but others’ experiences vary.)

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Excerpt from a letter from Anton Chekhov to his publisher, 1888:

You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

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From Anton Chekhov’s story “Gooseberries” (1898) (trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky):

“I said to myself: how many contented, happy people there really are! What an overwhelming force they are! Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying— Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their dead to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition— And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.

“That night I came to understand that I too had been contented and happy,” Ivan Ivanych continued, getting up. “I too over the dinner table or out hunting would hold forth on how to live, what to believe, the right way to govern the people. I too would say that learning was the enemy of darkness, that education was necessary but that for the common people the three R’s were sufficient for the time being. Freedom is a boon, I used to say, it is as essential as air, but we must wait awhile. Yes, that’s what I used to say, and now I ask: Why must we wait?” said Ivan Ivanych, looking wrathfully at Burkin. “Why must we wait, I ask you? For what reason? I am told that nothing can be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in its own time. But who is it that says so? Where is the proof that it is just? You cite the natural order of things, the law governing all phenomena, but is there law, is there order in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand beside a ditch and wait for it to close up of itself or fill up with silt, when I could jump over it or throw a bridge across it? And again, why must we wait? Wait, until we have no strength to live, and yet we have to live and are eager to live!”

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“[…] nearly every heist movie—predicated on an elaborate and improbable plan that must be executed perfectly in spite of all kinds of accidents and contingencies—is really about filmmaking.”

—“Another Soderbergh Puzzle!”, by A. O. Scott

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“Someone told me once that representation in fiction can either be a mirror (reflecting parts of the reader’s own experiences back at them) or a window (giving the reader a glimpse of experiences unfamiliar to them.) I love it when queer representation does both – I love seeing myself in stories, and I love seeing other people too.”

—Ari North, creator of the webcomic Always Human, in an interview

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“It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.”

—supposedly Aristotle, but apparently he didn’t quite say that

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An entry in the glossary at the back of A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine:

“Fulcrum—First in a series of Teixcalaanli popular novels about a band of thieves, grifters, and other criminals who take down corrupt officials for the good of the Empire and its people.”

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“Winter may be beautiful, but bed is much better.”

—Toad, in Frog and Toad All Year by Arnold Lobel

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“Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.”

—Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama, ch. 3

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“[Gravity] is a major factor in the lives of steeplejacks and mountaineers, but those of us who live more two-dimensional existences usually notice it only when we run upstairs in a hurry or sit on a chair which has unaccountably removed itself.”

—Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space (1951), p. 30

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Arthur E and I were driving somewhere, and we saw a spotlight sweeping back and forth across the sky. The following exchange ensued:

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“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie is worth 24,000 words per second. (TV is worth about 60,000 words per second, but half the letters are missing.)”

—Arthur Evans

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“Just kill me now, before the future gets any brighter.”

—Arthur Evans

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“Tarot readings do answer yes/no questions—but they answer them with things like ‘moose!’ ‘cataract!’ ‘four-on-the-floor!’”

—Arthur Evans

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“As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.”

—Audre Lorde, from “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” 1980. (Published in Sister Outsider.)

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B

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“I couldn’t help overhearing—I had my ear to the door.”

—Uncle Matt Beemish, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer

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A moment I like from early on in Barbara Kingsolver’s 1990 novel Animal Dreams:

Background: First-person protagonist Codi is sad because her beloved sister Hallie is leaving Tucson to drive to Nicaragua to do good there by working with crops. (Codi is staying behind in Tucson.)

I hugged her with all the strength in my arms. “Hallie,” I said, “Could you please just change your mind now and not go?”

“You really love me, so you want me to stay here and keep the suburbs safe for geraniums.”

“I know how I ought to feel,” I said. “I just don’t.”

Her breath expanded her chest against my arms, and I thought of the way a tree will keep on growing after a fence is wired around its trunk. The unbelievable force of that expansion. And I let her go.

—p. 33

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“The things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom.”

—Adah, in The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver (p. 209 of my edition)

In the book, she’s talking about a particular context, but I feel like the sentiment also applies to lots of other contexts.

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“…the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community.”

—from To Be Taught, if Fortunate, by Becky Chambers

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I like this line as the first thing we see about a newly introduced character:

“[…] had been in the middle of slathering a golden piece of toast with as much jam as it could structurally support […]”

—from A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers

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On tabletop-RPG rules:

“That sense of shared accomplishment is what all games in this field try to achieve. Good rules stack the deck in your favor. Bad rules get in your way and make you weep and argue until you decide to just ignore them.”

—Ben Robbins, in the Microscope Explorer supplement to his game Microscope

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Bernice Johnson Reagon on NPR, talking about her experience (as part of the Civil Rights Movement) of taking existing spirituals and changing/updating/adapting some of the words to suit the circumstances:

“The song that you know must name where you are.”

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🎵 And I thought about years

How they take so long

And they go so fast

—Beth Nielsen Chapman, “Years”

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“Your guys will do anything for you, Ted. They’ve got—what’s that thing again? Underlings have it. —Loyalty!”

—Veronica, in Better off Ted, s1e1

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“When one of your number is unclean because of an emission of seed at night, he must go outside the camp; he may not come within it.”

—Deuteronomy 23:10, The New English Bible

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“of making many books there is no end”

—Ecclesiastes 12:12, King James Version (and other versions)

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“It’s too bad the earth didn’t turn out to be flat because it would have been so much easier that way. Still, we have the materials, we have the time. We’re already halfway there.”

—Bill Barker, Schwa Corp

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“Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.”

—Bion of Borysthenes

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“He is a doctor and really clever. Just fancy! He is only nine-and-twenty, and has an immense lunatic asylum all under his own care.”

—Lucy Westenra, in Dracula, by Bram Stoker

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“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it.”

—Lucy Westenra, in Dracula, by Bram Stoker

(…Why not as many as she wants, Lucy?)

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Brian Kernighan on using clever tricks in programming:

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

—from The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd edition, chapter 2, as quoted in Wikiquote

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“Of course, individual issues were often disappointing. But the ritual of a magazine, its layout, its expectations, its continuity, its hazardous pact with readers and authors, elevates it to a sort of protolanguage which speaks as strongly as its actual fiction content.”

—Brian W. Aldiss on New Worlds, from his introduction to Decade: the 1960s (published in 1977)

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About a couple of specific attitudes toward typewriters in the US in the late 1800s:

Some persons’ feelings were hurt by the receipt of a typewritten letter on the grounds that the printing was an aspersion cast on their ability to read longhand.

[…]

Others regarded the Type-Writer as an invader of privacy, on the theory that no man was clever enough to run such a machine without a professional operator’s help, and that therefore a typewritten love letter must have been transcribed by a third person.

—from The Wonderful Writing Machine, by Bruce Bliven, Jr. (1954), pp. 70–71

(Clarification: Lots of people have always felt (both then and now) that handwritten letters are more personal than other kinds of letters. But I’m posting this quote because I hadn’t previously encountered these two very specific objections to typewritten letters, which aren’t really about typewriting being impersonal.)

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“[…] these things never work out as you plan. Reality’s a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams.”

—Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix, near the end of ch. 8

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From Bruce Sterling’s 1996 story “Bicycle Repairman.” A woman who claims to be a hotshot government agent is acting superior toward Mabel, a social worker.

“It’s a very dangerous world out there, Miss Social Counselor.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Mabel scoffed. “I’ve worked suicide hotlines! I’ve been a hostage negotiator! I’m a career social worker, girlfriend! I’ve seen more horror and suffering than you ever will. While you were doing push-ups in some comfy cracker training-camp, I’ve been out here in the real world!”

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C

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“The power [of literary fiction writers] to ‘show, not tell’ stemmed from […] writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that the audience would feel that those settings and stories were ‘universal.’”

—Cecilia Tan, from “Let Me Tell You”

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“All we need now is Frankenstein’s monster to make this party really gay”

—from Chad Oliver’s 1952 story “Final Exam”

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An exchange from the 2008 movie Changeling (set in 1928):

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“Don’t be afraid! We won’t make an author of you, while there’s an honest trade to be learnt, or brickmaking to turn to.”

—Mr. Brownlow, Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, ch. 14

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“Sometimes cannon balls are found embedded in trees. Doesn’t seem to be anything to discuss; doesn’t seem discussable that any one would cut a hole in a tree and hide a cannon ball, which one could take to bed, and hide under one’s pillow, just as easily.”

—from The Book of the Damned, by Charles Fort, ch. 6

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One day the Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.

Probably not, though.

—All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders

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“I thought Times New Roman was the font of all evil.”

—Charlie Jane Anders

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🎵 Light is returning,

Even though this is the darkest hour;

No one can hold back the dawn.

—from Charlie Murphy’s “Light Is Returning”

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From Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë:

He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen.

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I think that the following (from Jane Eyre), as a response to a marriage proposal, is probably somewhere in the all-time top ten hints that perhaps the proposer ought to back off:

I wish I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a rayless dungeon, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths—the fear of being persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish!

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Said one, “To-morrow shall be like

To-day, but much more sweet.”

—Christina Rossetti, “At Home”

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“Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.”

—the alien known as Ulysses, from Clifford D. Simak’s Waystation (1964)

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In her 1975 Afterword to The Best of C. L. Moore, Moore writes that contrary to a widespread misconception, her first story, “Shambleau,” which was published by Weird Tales, “was not rejected by every magazine in the field before it crept humbly to the doorstep of Weird Tales. [Instead,] I sent it first to WT[…] I was far too unsure of myself to have hammered on the door of every publisher in New York if my first opus had been so unkindly treated. I’d simply have given it up and turned to some other form of activity, and this book would not be in your hands now. (I’m glad it is, too.)”

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As long ago as 1887, Max Müller, the editor of The Sacred Books of the East, pointed out that for all practical purposes our ancestors of two thousand years ago were almost colour-blind, as most animals are today. ‘Xenophanes knew of three colours of the rainbow only—purple, red and yellow; that even Aristotle spoke of the tricoloured rainbow; and that Democritus knew of no more than four colours—black, white, red and yellow.’ Homer apparently thought the sea the same colour as wine. There are no colour words in primitive Indo-European speech. We can understand why Aristotle’s pupil Alexander of Macedon spent his life conquering the world. It must have been a singularly dull world, with no distinction between the red of wine, the blue-green of the sea, the emerald-green of grass and the deep-blue of the sky. But it is understandable, biologically speaking. Life was hard and violent, and the capacity to grasp subtle distinctions of thought or colour would have been of no value for survival. Alexander was energetic and imaginative; what else was there for him to do but conquer the world, and then cry when there was no more to conquer?

—Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History (1971), from the Introduction, p. 30

Yeah, makes sense. I’m partly color-blind myself, and kind of imaginative, so I agree that there’s nothing else I could possibly do other than conquer the world. I hope the rest of y’all color-blind people will join me; after all, life without color is just too boring unless we’re out conquering.

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“If you’re alive, you’re alive. If you’re alive-with, then you know the other life is there too[…] That’s the weapon. There’s not a flame or a gun or a poison that can stop it.”

—D’Joan, in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” by Cordwainer Smith

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“I don’t like being in crowds of people I don’t know, mostly because I feel like I’m not in control. I don’t mind people; I just don’t like surprises.”

—Maria, in Courtney Milan’s Hold Me

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D

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“Woe filled him at least halfway.”

—from Daniel Handler’s story “Naturally”

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‘“Protagonist” is Greek for “the fictional person whose conduct I take most personally”’

—Daniel Lavery, from his post about Happiest Season

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“The problem with all-powerful conspiracies on serialized TV shows is that, inevitably, they have to be defeated by regular people, and that can’t help but make the conspiracies look just a little bit silly.”

—Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly recap for episode 5 of The Event

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“So the government is now blaming Flight 514’s disappearance on ‘Brazilian Separatists.’ (I like to visualize Blake Sterling pulling that card out of a ‘Random Terrorist Group’ box, right next to ‘Finnish Anarchists’ and ‘Communist Penguins.’)”

—Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly recap for episode 8 of The Event

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“NUCLEAR SECURITY: Obviously, this is too big a job for the Department of Energy (Motto: ‘Somebody Has Stolen Our Motto’).”

—Dave Barry

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“Dammit Jim, I’m a free man, not a number!”

—Dave Litchman

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Footnote about tourism, from David Foster Wallace’s article Consider the Lobster (PDF):

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. […] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

I don’t necessarily fully agree with that statement or its implications, but I thought it was interesting and well-written.

---

Interesting framing of metaphor and literalism in sf:

“[…] a majority of [adult] readers had no interest in learning how to read [SF], a practice easily picked up by children and teenagers—by taking every detail literally at first, until given other directions by the text. This is just the reverse of the way we approach the prose literature of this century; to read with a sensitivity to metaphor and subtext, assuming that that is the route by which the essential communication between reader and text will take place.”

—David Hartwell, intro to The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989)

Note: He explicitly adds that this is not to say there’s no metaphor in sf; he’s just noting that in sf, a lot of things that might look like metaphors to less-genre-familiar readers are meant to be taken literally.

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“[We] considered learning how to say ‘I am an imperialist pig and don’t believe in foreign languages. Do you speak English?’ But decided that Please and Thank You would be more useful.”

—Deb Barolsky

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“I am not in the habit of raising my voice. [Instead,] when I retire, I will write a short story in revenge.”

—Vivian, Desert Hearts

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“The little hands on the clock came coquettishly in front of its gold face and parted suddenly as if saying, ‘Oh, all’s well, I need not hide,’ with the pettish nonchalance of ninety-eight cent clocks.”

—Djuna Barnes, “Paprika Johnson” (1915)

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“The head is magnificent and bald. Like a woman who is so beautiful that clothes instinctively fall from her, this head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.”

—Djuna Barnes, “Who Is This Tom Scarlett?” (1917)

---

“[…] he has given them to eat of the fruit of his soul—and because it was tropical and strange and they could not eat it, they said it was not eatable.”

—Djuna Barnes, “Who Is This Tom Scarlett?” (1917)

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“You, dear reader, are an old hand at the gender-matching game. No doubt about it! From a tender age you have guessed the gender of countless humans whose bodies are covered by clothes, coming to conclusions based on the gender you believe corresponds to the shape of genitals you believe match up with the remaining exposed parts of their bodies, and you have lived your lives in certainty, believing the result of your deductions to be true. The problem is, however, that you do not acknowledge the mistakes you have made and will continue to make.”

—the alien narrator of Walking Practice, by Dolki Min, trans. Victoria Caudle

(I’m sure this isn’t true of some people. But I’m also pretty sure that it is true of a lot of people. Anyway, I’m quoting it just ’cause I found it an interesting framing/lens.)

---

archy is it original

it was once i answered truthfully

and may be again

—Don Marquis, “archy hears from mars”

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—Dr. Who serial The Three Doctors

---

—Dr. Who serial Time and the Rani

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Several quotes from various parts of “Quite Early One Morning,” by Dylan Thomas. (Broadcast in 1945, published in print form in 1946.)

Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, […]

Here, the roof of the police-station, black as a helmet, dry as a summons, sober as Sunday.

[…] fading photographs of the bearded and censorious dead […]

Birds sang in eaves, bushes, trees, on telegraph wires, rails, fences, spars, and wet masts, not for love or joy, but to keep other birds away. The landlords in feathers disputed the right of even the flying light to descend and perch.

[…] the first whirring nudge of arranged time in the belly of the alarm clock […]

And a far-away clock struck from another church in another village in another universe, though the wind blew the time away.

[…] and down to the bilingual sea.

[…] against the chapel-dark sea […]

[…] over the slow-speaking sea […]

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E

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“I shall not burden the reader with an explanation, however, as the facts are tedious and implausible.”

—E. B. White, “The Morning of the Day They Did It” (1950)

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Thoreau, very likely without quite knowing what he was up to, took man’s relation to nature and man’s dilemma in society and man’s capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day.

—E. B. White, The Yale Review, 1954

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“I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random[…]”

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” after starting with 200 words of rambling about analytical people

(After this line, there’s another thousand words of further rambling about analytical people (and comparing chess to checkers and whist, &c) before Poe finally gets around to telling the story.)

---

“In painting, you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.”

—Edgar Degas

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Dirge Without Music

by Edna St. Vincent Millay; from The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems, 1928

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

---

The Unexplorer

by Edna St. Vincent Millay; from A Few Figs from Thistles, 1922

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“Do we know what we’re doing and why?”

“No.”

“Do we care?”

“We’ll work it all out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.”

—from Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975

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“Every point of life is a pivot on which turns the whole action of our after-lives; and so, indeed, of the after-lives of the whole world. But we are so purblind that we only see this of certain special enterprises and endeavors, which we therefore call critical.”

—Edward Everett Hale, “The Children of the Public,” 1863

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“During the daytime, Violet chiefly occupied herself in putting salt water into a churn; while her three brothers churned it violently, in the hope that it would turn into butter, which it seldom if ever did…”

—Edward Lear, from “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Around the World”

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“since feeling is first”

by E. E. Cummings

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry

—the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

---

(While you and i have lips and voices which

are for kissing and to sing with

who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch

invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

—E. E. Cummings, from “voices to voices,lip to lip”

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Humans discover that the alien society is polygamous:

“So a man has half a dozen or so wives?” Dorothy was asking in surprise. “How can you get along—I'd fight like a wildcat if Dick got any such funny ideas as that!”

“Why, splendidly, of course. I wouldn't think of ever marrying a man if he was such a … a … a louse that only one woman would have him!”

—from The Skylark of Space, by E. E. “Doc” Smith, p. 112

(In the original 1928 magazine publication, which is available from Project Gutenberg, that scene has slightly different dialogue (with the same meaning), and includes another line: “And think how lonely one would be while her husband is away at war—we would go insane if we did not have the company of the other wives.”)

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A description of Gray Roger, from pages 103–104 of the 1965 Pyramid paperback edition of Triplanetary (the first Lensman novel), by E. E. “Doc” Smith:

“Seated impassively at the desk there was a gray man. Not only was he dressed entirely in gray, but his heavy hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and even his tanned skin seemed to give the impression of grayness in disguise. His overwhelming personality radiated an aura of grayness—not the gentle gray of the dove, but the resistless, driving gray of the super-dreadnaught; the hard, inflexible, brittle gray of the fracture of high-carbon steel.”

---

“A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged, and searingly bit. Rods and cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore, and ground in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall-shields, in such numbers and with such violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary density.”

—from Second Stage Lensman, by E. E. “Doc” Smith

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“In addition to filling pages of magazines that might otherwise have been filled with even worse fiction,…”

—from the introduction, by E. F. Bleiler, to the Bleiler-edited collection of Robert W. Chambers stories The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories

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“It’s not like men are from Mars and women are from Venus; it’s more like men are from North Dakota and women are from South Dakota.”

—Elaine Shapiro, possibly paraphrased

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“After she’d decided to be a hero, Hermione had done the obvious thing, and gone to the Hogwarts library and taken out books on how to be a hero.”

—from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky

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This is why feminist history is so crucial: not simply because it informs our present but more so because it enables other virtual futures to be conceived, other perspectives to be developed, than those that currently prevail.

[…The past] must be regarded as being inherently open to future rewritings[…] The past is never exhausted in its virtualities, insofar as it is always capable of giving rise to another reading, another context, another framework that will animate it in different ways.

—Elizabeth Grosz, from “Histories of a Feminist Future,” as quoted by L. Timmel Duchamp in “For a Genealogy of Feminist SF: Reflections on Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction, 1818–1960”

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“Strong verbs for a strong America!”

—Elliott Moreton

---

E.M. Forster, in 1909, presciently describes turning social media back on again after a little time away from it, and then proceeding to teach remotely:

Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?—say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation—a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one[…]. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.

—from “The Machine Stops” (1909), by E.M. Forster

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“Jim Guy Tucker—the first 3-name politician with a built-in gender check.”

—Emil Guillermo (sp?), KSFO

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“Unluckily it was a heap of dead rabbits.”

—from Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

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Next time you want to indicate how really essential it is that you go somewhere, try saying this:

“Know that our journey is a matter determined of, and it is fixed with nails of diamond to the wall of inevitable necessity.”

—The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddison, p. 163

---

From Erin McKean’s 2006 post “You Don’t Have to Be Pretty”:

You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female.”

(That paragraph is widely misattributed to Diana Vreeland; Vreeland’s photo is at the top of the post, and McKean mentions Vreeland by name near the end, but Vreeland didn’t write it.)

Another line I liked: “I was going to make a handy prettiness decision tree, but pretty much the end of every branch was a bubble that said ‘tell complainers to go to hell’ so it wasn’t much of a tool.”

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If it is friendly I will make friends with it, and if it is not friendly I will fight with it.

Either course would be a good, manly occupation, something that Pwyll understood and knew how to do.

—Prince of Annwn, by Evangeline Walton, p. 25

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A disclaimer near the end of the credits for a partly-animated short film called “Extinction of the Saber-Toothed Housecat”:

Many animals were hurt during the filming of this short… too many to count, in fact… granted, I was never any good at counting…

But none of them were cute animals, and we ate all of them afterwards so it’s all good.

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F

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Plague also multiplied what we would call dereliction of duty: municipal magistrates, officers and prelates forgot their responsibilities; in France whole parlements emigrated [when faced with plagues in the 1500s and 1600s]. […] When plague broke out in London in 1664 the Court left the town for Oxford and the richest members of the population hastened to follow suit[…] It is remarkable how closely Daniel Defoe’s retrospective (1720) account of the 1664 plague of London corresponds to the customary pattern, repeated thousands of times with the same actions […], the same precautions, despair and social discrimination.

No disease today, however great its ravages, gives rise to comparable acts of folly or collective dramas.

—Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (c. 1980), pp 85–87

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Here are some assorted quotes from Fernand Braudel’s Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life. (Published in French in 1979; English translation by Siân Reynolds published in 1981.) These quotes don’t make a unified whole; they’re just lines that caught my attention.

American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky has written: “I for one do not lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture.” (p. 186)

Following the catastrophes of the Black Death, living conditions for workers were inevitably good[,] as manpower had become scarce. (p. 193)

The individual fork dates from about the sixteenth century; it spread from Venice and Italy in general, though not very quickly. A German preacher condemned it as a diabolical luxury: God would not have given us fingers if he had wished us to use such an instrument. (p. 205)

Whole towns—and very wealthy ones at that—were poorly supplied with water. [… For Venice, f]resh water had to be brought from outside, not by aqueduct but by boats filled in the Brenta and sent to Venice daily. (p. 228)

Twenty thousand [water] carriers earned a living (though a poor one) supplying Paris with water[…] the Périer brothers installed two steam pumps […] in 1782 […] which raised water 110 feet[…] But people were worried: what would happen to the twenty thousand water carriers if the number of machines increased? (p. 230)

The history of costume […] touches on every issue—raw materials, production processes, manufacturing costs, cultural stability, fashion and social hierarchy. Subject to incessant change, costume everywhere is a persistent reminder of social position. (p. 311)

Is fashion in fact such a trifling thing? Or is it, as I prefer to think, rather an indication of deeper phenomena—of the energies, possibilities, demands and joie de vivre of a given society, economy and civilization? (p. 323)

In short, at the very deepest levels of material life, there is at work a complex order, to which the assumptions, tendencies and unconscious pressures of economies, societies and civilizations all contribute. (p. 333)

In a way, everything is technology: not only man’s most strenuous endeavours but also his patient and monotonous efforts to make a mark on the external world; not only the rapid changes we are a little too ready to label revolutions (gunpowder, long-distance navigation, the printing-press, windmills and watermills, the first machines) but also the slow improvements in processes and tools, and those innumerable actions which may have no immediate innovating significance but which are the fruit of accumulated knowledge. (p. 334)

To say society is to speak of a history that is slow, mute and complicated; a memory that obstinately repeats known solutions, to avoid the difficulty and danger of imagining something else. (p. 335)

In fact there is never any progress unless a higher value is set on human labour. When man has a certain cost price as a source of energy, then it is necessary to think about aiding him or, better still, replacing him. (p. 339)

Carrying was the second occupation of millions of peasants in the West after the grain or grape harvest or during the winter months, and they were poorly paid for it. (p. 425) [By “carrying,” here, I think he means all sorts of transporting of goods—not necessarily manually/individually carrying stuff on their backs, but also (for example) crewing ships that carried stuff.]

But if it is possible to say that everything is money, it is just as possible to claim that everything is, on the contrary, credit—promises, deferred reality. Even this louis d’or was given me as a promise, as a cheque […] It is a cheque on the collection of tangible goods and services within my reach and amongst which, tomorrow or later, I will finally make my choice. (p. 476)

Money gave a certain unity to the world, but it was the unity of injustice. (p. 477)

Where there is a town, there will be division of labour, and where there is any marked division of labour, there will be a town. (p. 479)

Material life, of course, presents itself to us in the anecdotal form of thousands and thousands of assorted facts. […] This is the dust of history, micro-history in the same sense that Georges Gurvitch talks about micro-sociology: little facts which do, it is true, by indefinite repetition, add up to form linked chains. (p. 560)

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“You know what the difference is between a chicken with one wing and a chicken with two wings? A matter of a pinion.”

—“Flash Gordon,” at BayCon

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A couple of interesting bits from “The Poetry of Other Minds,” by Frank Michel, from Defiance #2, 1971:

“We need a poetry and a poetic sensibility that is in the world, is hurt and disturbed by the world, and at one point finally grows angry at its hurt. If this poetry sometimes disturbs and upsets us, we will trust it because we trust the sensibility that is creating it.”

“A poem is political […] only when its author is in revolt and feels bound to give [their] revolt expression. The poem’s politics is the rock it throws at the way things are and the way we are.”

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“As it was pouring down rain, and freezing, and cold, and wet, and slippery … , and all these guests … lived many miles away, and as none of them had any hats, or knew the way home, they were very miserable indeed.”

—Frank R. Stockton, from “Ting-a-ling,” apparently first published in 1869

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“If some things were different, other things would be otherwise.”

—Frank R. Stockton, “The Griffin and the Minor Canon”

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Fred Astaire on Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings:

“Her solo dances were outstanding. We had plenty of dances together, too, and they did not miss. That Cyd! When you’ve danced with her you stay danced with.”

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🎵 Love leaves a trace,

And the heart holds a place

For love’s return.

—Fred Small, “Scott and Jamie”

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🎵 Too many people having too many babies—

Got to love them babies, but it’s out of control.

—Fred Small, “Too Many People”

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🎵 You can live by yourself; you can gather friends around; you can choose one special one;

And the only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you’re done.

—Fred Small, “Everything Possible”

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s best trait was his modesty:

“With [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights—the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance—it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness.”

—Ecce Homo, Preface, §4, trans. Walter Kaufmann

(As quoted in Wikipedia.)

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When I skimmed Fritz Leiber’s short novel Destiny Times Three, written in 1945, I noticed that even in the explicitly-labeled-as-utopian world portrayed at the start of the book, there are few if any women; certainly the council that rules the world consists entirely of men. I sighed and chalked it up to the times; not uncommon for sf written in 1945 to include no women.

But in a note about the book (tacked onto his comments on Spinrad’s Riding the Torch, published in the same volume), Leiber says that Destiny Times Three was originally planned to be at least twice as long, but when he wrote to John W. Campbell about the book, Campbell told him that American servicemen who subscribed to Astounding had asked JWC not to publish serials, because they weren’t receiving every issue. So Leiber cut the book down to fit in two parts instead of his originally planned four or five.

Here’s his description of the cutting-down process:

And so in the course of one feverish, miserable, long castrating night, I spread my vast outline on the cleared dining-room table and ruthlessly pared it down. (I and my wife needed the money!) My God, I even cut out all the female characters—something had to go and they were a shade less central to the plot. […] each major character had to appear in triplicate [so the four main characters were really twelve main characters.] At only 40,000 words or so, I couldn’t handle over a dozen major characters. A drastic simplification to a manageable six was required, though I’m sure now it was a mistake to sacrifice the women. As a result, the diminished novel has a ghostly, cold, lonely male quality to me, peopled by the resentful, unseen feminine presences of all those cut characters. I don’t think my Anima ever forgave me.

I’m sorry about that, for at the time I greatly loved [the world of the story]. It’s not good to pull in your sights, scale down your concepts. For the next five years I had a lot of trouble writing anything at all.

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I’m reading Leiber stories, and though I don’t love his work the way I once did, I continue to like his word choices.

Some examples, all from the first few pages of his 1950 story “The Enchanted Forest”:

“Machinery whirred limpingly…”

“A sharp gay laugh etched itself against the woundedly-humming dark.”

“[Protagonist] snapped off his dustgun, flirted sweat from his face…”

“…the sinister black confetti of the meteorite swarm…”

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“…a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not the center—in money, in position, in authority—remained with him for the rest of his life.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy” (1926)

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G

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(America Chavez has gone back in time to WWII and punched Hitler.)

—America #2, written by Gabby Rivera

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[…]

hawk dipping and circling

over salt marsh

ah, this slow-paced

system of systems, whirling and turning

[…]

grasshopper man in his car driving through.

—Gary Snyder, from “Little Songs for Gaia”

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As the crickets’ soft autumn hum

is to us,

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills.

—Gary Snyder, from “Little Songs for Gaia”

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One boy asks, “where do rivers start?”

in threads in hills, and gather down to here—

but the river

is all of it everywhere,

all flowing at once,

all one place.

—Gary Snyder, from “River in the Valley”

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“[…] the crowd […] seemed to have been in solution in the air, so suddenly had it precipitated round the accident.”

—George Bernard Shaw, “Aerial Football: The New Game”

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George Orwell on the arrival of spring:

“At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

—from “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946)

(Not particularly recommending the whole essay, but linking for citation. If you do read it, content warning for a casual mildly exoticized reference to Chinese and Japanese people.)

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Two excerpts from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

[…]

I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. [Or: “Omit needless words.” —Jed]
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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George Takei, about s3 of ST:TOS: “[…] they gave us a very bad time slot […]: Friday nights at 10. […] I consider Star Trek an intelligent, hip, with-it show, and that kind of audience was not at home watching TV on Friday nights. They were out being intelligent and hip and with-it.”

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“Nobody sees a flower, really—it is so small—we haven’t time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

—Georgia O’Keeffe

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—Gilmore Girls, s5 e6

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At some point I may make a separate page of Gilmore Girls quotations, but for now I’ll leave this here (from early in s6):

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From Si Kahn’s and Pete Seeger’s and Jane Sapp’s rendition of Gil Turner’s “Carry It On” (YouTube). Their version of the last verse, lightly modified:

🎵 When you can’t go on any longer,

Take the hands of your sisters and brothers.

Every victory [brings] another.

Carry it on; carry it on.

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I liked this bit from The Good Wife (s1e14, “Hi”):

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🎵 Oh, my Joanie, don’t you know

That the stars are swinging slow,

And the seas are rolling easy

As they did so long ago?

If I had a thing to give you,

I would tell you one more time

That the world is always turning toward the morning.

—Gordon Bok, chorus of “Turning Toward the Morning” (YouTube)

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“THEY SPEAK THE TRUTH! ONLY IT IS HIDDEN BEHIND THINLY VEILED LIES!”

—Greg Alt

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Greg Egan is apparently not impressed with longtermists and the LessWrong crowd. From Egan’s story “Death and the Gorgon,” published in Asimov’s in 2024:

“But at some point [a particular character had] started hanging out on forums with names like cheesy self-improvement books, whose hosts claimed to promote the art of thinking more rationally and avoiding the pitfalls that confused the addled masses. The trouble was, they interspersed all their actual debunking of logical fallacies with much more tendentious claims, wrapped in cloaks of faux-objectivity. They seemed especially prone to an abuse of probabilistic methods, where they pretended they could quantify both the likelihood and the potential harm for various implausible scenarios, and then treated the results of their calculations—built on numbers they’d plucked out of the air—as an unimpeachable basis for action.”

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And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle

Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust—

—Gregory Corso, from “Marriage”

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“[H]uman speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.”

—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, as translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling

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“Tradition is the handing down of the flame and not the worshipping of ashes.”

—attributed to Gustav Mahler

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H

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“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

—Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Hans Zinsser’s 1935 book Rats, Lice and History includes quite a bit of discussion of art and its relation to science. In his preface, Zinsser writes:

For our chapters and comments on matters of literary interest we make no apologies. Although we regard them as pertinent to the general scheme of our exposition, many will regard them as merely impertinent. But, in a way, this book is a protest against the American attitude which tends to insist that a specialist should have no interests beyond his chosen field… [T]he day has twenty-four hours; one can work but ten and sleep but eight.

We hold that one type of intelligent occupation should, in all but exceptional cases, increase the capacity for comprehension in general; that it is an error to segregate the minds of men into rigid guild classifications; and that art and sciences have much in common and both may profit by mutual appraisal.

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“This book, if it is ever written, and—if written—it finds a publisher, and—if published—anyone reads it, will be recognized with some difficulty as a biography.”

—Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History

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“Having written the preceding paragraphs, we read them over and came to the conclusion that there was little in them that mattered very much.”

—Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History

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…Take T. S. Eliot—who, in his prose, shows great clarity of thought and to whom no one will deny talent, originality, and, on occasion, great beauty. But in much of his poetry he plays, as has been aptly remarked, a guessing game with readers, whom he seems to appraise, apparently with some reason, as imbeciles. “Guess which memory picture of my obviously one-sided erudition I am alluding to? See note 6a.” Then he drops suddenly, after a few lines of majestic verse, into completely irrelevant babble.

“In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.”

One is tempted to add, “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo.”

—Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History

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“I’ve wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, and I’m happy to say I finally won out over it.”

—Elwood P. Dowd, in Harvey

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From Fuzzy Sapiens, by H. Beam Piper:

[Victor Grego says the word “Fuzzyologists” in conversation with Ernst Mallin.]

“I deplore that term, Mr. Grego. The suffix is Greek, from logos. Fuzzy is not a Greek word, and should not be combined with it.”

“Oh, rubbish, Ernst. We’re not speaking Greek; we’re speaking Lingua Terra. You know what Lingua Terra is? An indiscriminate mixture of English, Spanish, Portuguese and Afrikaans, mostly English. And you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the Ninth Century Pre-Atomic, and no more legitimate than any of the other results. If a little Greek suffix gets into a mess like that, it’ll have to take care of itself the best way it can.”

—pp. 96-97

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While Gamow and Landau were at the Institute, the three of us often went to the movies together, and we had a preference for lowbrow and lurid films. Sometimes we could persuade Bohr to come with us to see a Western or a gangster film we had selected. His comments were always remarkable because he used to introduce some of his ideas on observations and measurements into his criticism.

Once, after a thoroughly stupid Tom Mix film, his verdict went as follows: “I did not like that picture; it was too improbable. That the scoundrel runs off with the beautiful girl is logical; it always happens. That the bridge collapses under their carriage is unlikely but I am willing to accept it. That the the heroine remains suspended in mid-air over a precipice is even more unlikely, but again I accept it. I am even willing to accept that at that very moment Tom Mix is coming by on his horse. But that at that very moment there should also be a fellow with a motion-picture camera to film the whole business—that is more than I am willing to believe.”

—from Haphazard Reality: Half a Century of Science, by H. B. G. Casimir, p. 97

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“As your token straight friend, it’s my duty to remind you that sometimes people are straight. It’s an unfortunate fact of life.”

—Tao Xu, Heartstopper (the TV show), s1e2

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“When I talk of my laziness, it only applies to the writing of prose. I have often sat up all night over my scores, and have spent eight hours at a time labouring at instrumentation, without once changing my position; but I have to fight with myself to begin to write a page of prose, and about the tenth line or so I get up, walk about the room, look out into the street, take up a book, and strive by any means to overcome the weariness and fatigue which instantly overpower me. I have to return to the charge eight or ten times before I can finish an article for the Journal des Débats, and it takes me quite two days to write one, even when I like the subject and am interested by it. And then, what erasures, and what scrawls! You should see my first draft!”

—Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, Dover edition, p. 80

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From a 1910 diary entry written by Helen Jacobus Apte:

“I heard a great commotion and noticed everyone looking up. There was a great dirigible balloon, flying right above my head. What a wonderful age we live in, but I wager we will be telling our children how we remember the first air ships and how everyone gathered in the street to watch ‘what is now so common a sight, my dears. My, my what will be invented next? Have you heard about the new thought wave? Why, last week I talked to a cousin in San Francisco and heard as plainly or far more so than over the old-fashioned long distance phone, and merely by concentrating my mind!’”

—from Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman, entry for February 16, 1910 (p. 21)

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From Helen Merrick’s 2009 book The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms, an interesting note in passing about Russ and Le Guin (and others):

The only genre sf writer to appear in feminist literary studies [from the 1980s and 1990s] with any frequency is Joanna Russ.

[…]

(Other writers of “canonical” status in feminist sf criticism, such as Tiptree and Charnas, rarely rate a mention, and, despite the common assumption that she is one of the few sf writers to receive critical appraisal outside the genre, Le Guin also receives very little attention in feminist literary studies.)

[A footnote to the above parenthetical sentence:] Out of a sample of over twenty book-length studies of contemporary women’s writing, only two mention Le Guin as an sf writer, but they do not discuss her work; Tiptree is discussed [in one of the studies], while both Tiptree’s and Charnas’s work are discussed in some studies of feminist utopias.

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“I look upon man but as a fungus.”

—Henry David Thoreau

(#NotAllMen)

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Thoreau on keeping a journal:

Of all strange and unaccountable things, this journalising is the strangest. It will allow nothing to be predicted of it; its good is not good, nor its bad bad. If I make a huge effort to expose my innermost and richest wares to light, my counter seems cluttered with the meanest homemade stuffs; but after months or years I may discover the wealth of India, and whatever rarity is brought overland from Cathay, in that confused heap, and what perhaps seemed a festoon of dried apple or pumpkin will prove a string of Brazilian diamonds, or pearls from Coromandel.

If Thoreau were alive today, I wonder if he would have a satellite feed to a laptop out there in Walden, and if he would post social media posts every day about the glories of Nature.

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“If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.”

—Henry Green

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In a 1950 Henry Kuttner comedy science fiction story called “The Voice of the Lobster,” at one point the protagonist expresses a desire to not be seen by anyone, and then adds:

“[…] I wish I were a Cerean*. Ah, well.”

A footnote at the bottom of the page explains:

“*The inhabitants of Ceres were long supposed to be invisible. Lately it has been discovered that Ceres has no inhabitants.”

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Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,

Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;

So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,

Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

—from "The Theologian's Tale; Elizabeth," from Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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“If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident[…]”

—Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi, p. 12 of the 1970 Bantam paperback edition (original German version published 1943)

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“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

—H. G. Wells

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“Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room—in moments of devotion, a temple—and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated—darkness still.”

—H. G. Wells, from “The Rediscovery of the Unique” (1891)

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In H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods (1904), a Lady (who has just appeared in the narrative for the first time) is told that her charitable aid is needed yet again, and she’s concerned that she might be being taken advantage of:

“The hand of Lady Wondershoot quivered, with that C.O.S. sort of emotion, that suspicious rage that stirs in all true aristocrats, at the thought that possibly the meaner classes are after all—as mean as their betters, and—where the sting lies—scoring points in the game.”

(“C.O.S.” apparently stands for “Charity Organisation Society”—Wikipedia says “The COS was resented by the poor for its harshness, and its acronym was rendered by critics as ‘Cringe or Starve.’” So I’m thinking that by abbreviating it, Wells may have intended the reader to think of that alternate expansion.)

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“…But these stories of mine […] do not pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. […] They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream. They have to hold the reader to the end by art and illusion and not by proof and argument, and the moment [the reader] closes the cover and reflects[, they wake up] to their impossibility.”

—H. G. Wells (distinguishing his work from Verne’s), preface to Seven Famous Novels, 1934

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From quiet homes and first beginning

Out to the undiscovered ends

There’s nothing worth the wear of winning

But laughter and the love of friends.

—Hilaire Belloc

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A quote from the movie Holiday:

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“The trouble with paranoia (as Pynchon and others […] said) is the deeper you dig, the more you uncover, whether it’s there or not. It’s the ultimate feedback system—the more you believe, the more you find to believe.”

—Howard Waldrop, “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On)”

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The main thing guys like Godard and Truffaut had going for them was that they didn't understand English very well.

Like in Riot in Cell Block 11, when Neville Brand gets shot at by the prison guard with a Thompson, he yells:

"Look out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!"

What the Cahiers people heard was:

"Steady, mon frère! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams."

—Howard Waldrop, “French Scenes”

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I

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“Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.

“Why, of course!” she laughed.

“Then why do you do it?”

“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.”

“Hmm,” he said.

[…]

“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?”

“Yes,” he agreed.

The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?”

He smiled. “I suppose not.”

“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” She looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.”

—Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (1990), ch. IV

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—@iamspacegirl on Twitter (original post is no longer available)

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“It is not always a question of the Emperor having no clothes on. Sometimes it is, ‘Is that an Emperor at all?’”

—Idries Shah, Reflections, p. 145 (1977 Penguin paperback edition)

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me: correct me if I’m wrong- the internet: sir, we will correct you even if you’re right

—@IndecisiveJones on X/Twitter, Sep 6, 2023

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“It is not for years that she realizes how much effort is tucked into Lucy’s bright smiles. The joy is not a lie, the faith is not contrived, but it is built. Lucy pulls herself out of bed each morning. She watches the fires of the day climb and conquer the sky, and dares her world to be anything less than magical.”

—from a story about Susan Pevensie by @ink-splotch

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Isaac Asimov on self-driving cars (from “Sally,” published in 1953):

I can remember when there wasn’t an automobile in the world with brains enough to find its own way home. I chauffeured dead lumps of machines that needed a [human’s] hand at their controls every minute. Every year machines like that used to kill tens of thousands of people.

The automatics fixed that. A positronic brain can react much faster than a human one, of course[…]. You got in, punched your destination and let it go its own way.

We take it for granted now, but I remember when the first laws came out forcing the old machines off the highways and limiting travel to automatics. Lord, what a fuss. They called it everything from communism to fascism, but it emptied the highways and stopped the killing[…]

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“I love you,” he said.

There was a short silence; things grew in it.

—Isak Dinesen, “Copenhagen Season”

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J

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“One of the reasons George Lucas had trouble getting 20th Century-Fox to finance Star Wars was premise research that showed no one wanted to see a movie with a princess in it.”

—Jack Mathews, The Battle of Brazil, pp. 24–25

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(Content warning for quoting Hitler.)

Recording has always been a means of social control, a stake in politics, regardless of the available technologies. Power is no longer content to enact its legitimacy; it records and reproduces the societies it rules. Stockpiling memory, retaining history or time, distributing speech, and manipulating information has always been an attribute of civil and priestly power[…] Possessing the means of recording allows one to monitor noises, to maintain them, and to control their repetition within a determined code. In the final analysis, it allows one to impose one’s own noise and to silence others: “Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany,” wrote Hitler in 1938 in the Manual of German Radio.

—Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1985)

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J. A. Etzler, writing about the steam engine in 1842:

“Fellow men! I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful of forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years.”

(As quoted by Stan Augarten in Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers (1984), p. 284.)

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From “The Music from Behind the Moon,” by James Branch Cabell (1948):

22: Near Yggdrasill

Not ever before had anybody essayed to cheat the Norns in quite this fashion: and so, from their quiet studio, by Yggdrasill, the Gray Three noticed this quaint expurgating of their work almost at once.

Verdandi, in fact, took off her reading glasses so as to observe just what was happening over yonder. “Oh, yes, I see!” she said comfortably. “It is only a poet altering the history of Earth.”

Her sisters glanced up from their writing: and they all smiled. Urdhr remarked, “These poets! they are always trying to escape their allotted doom.”

But Skuld looked rather pensively at each of the two other literary ladies before she said, “One almost pities them at times.”

Then Urdhr laughed outright. “My darling, you waste sympathy in this sweet fashion because we also were poets when we wrote Earth’s Epic. For myself, I grant we made a mistake to put any literary people in the book. Still, it is a mistake to which most beginners are prone: and that story, you must remember, was one of our first efforts. All inexperienced girls must necessarily write balderdash. So we put poets in that book, and death, and love, and common-sense, and I can hardly remember what other incredibilities.”

With that, they all laughed again, to think of their art’s crude beginnings.

---

The blurb for a book called Domination and the Arts of Resistance, by James C. Scott:

Confrontations between the powerless and the powerful are laden with deception—the powerless feign deference and the powerful subtly assert their mastery. Peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, labourers, and prisoners are not free to speak their minds in the presence of power. These subordinate groups instead create a secret discourse that represents a critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant. At the same time, the powerful also develop a private dialogue about practices and goals of their rule that cannot be openly avowed. In this book, the author, a social scientist, offers a discussion both of the public roles played by the powerful and powerless and the mocking, vengeful tone they display off stage—what he terms their public and hidden transcripts. Using examples from the literature, history, and politics of cultures around the world, the author examines the many guises this interaction has taken throughout history and the tensions and contradictions it reflects. The author describes the ideological resistance of subordinate groups—their gossip, folktales, songs, jokes, and theater—their use of anonymity and ambiguity. He also analyzes how ruling elites attempt to convey an impression of hegemony through such devices as parades, state ceremony, and rituals of subordination and apology. Finally he identifies—with quotations that range from the recollections of American slaves to those of Russian citizens during the beginnings of Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign—the political electricity generated among oppressed groups when, for the first time, the hidden transcript is spoken directly and publicly in the face of power.

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How to make math and science sound exciting:

“systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom […] required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable[…]”

—James Gleick, Chaos, p. 137

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“Why should the laws of chaos apply to the heart[…]?”

—James Gleick, Chaos, p. 288

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“The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.”

—from the inscription on the monument to James Larkin in Dublin; Larkin apparently got the line from a French slogan that appeared in various versions dating back to the 1500s

“He talked to the workers, spoke as only Jim Larkin could speak, not for an assignation with peace, dark obedience, or placid resignation, but trumpet-tongued of resistance to wrong, discontent with leering poverty, and defiance of any power strutting out to stand in the way of their march onward.”

—also on the Larkin monument; from Drums under the Windows, by Seán O’Casey

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The opportunity of a Western is that it takes issues of our culture—conflict, racial conflict, economic injustice, what is good, what is evil, what is murder, what is justified—and it puts them in a fantastical landscape that allows us, very much like science fiction does, to see these issues in a way that we’re free of our own . . . loyalties. I’m in a world where I don’t have any immediate identifiable [unintelligible], so I’m forced to look at the issues and the themes underneath them from a new perspective.

—Director James Mangold, in a making-of segment (“An Epic Explored”) for the 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma

(I’m not sure what that garbled word was. Maybe “likeness”?)

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“The key to writing short novels is to leave words out. Generally speaking, the more words that are in a novel, the longer it’s going to be.”

—James Nicoll, in a 2023 review of Lincoln’s Dreams

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“In the seventies, radical feminists [said that Freud] had single-handedly queered sex for a century”

—James R. Petersen, The Century of Sex, p. 326

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“Every eleven seconds in America some man, woman, or child is stricken with Googleman’s disease.”

—James Thurber, making up a disease name in “How the Kooks Crumble,” first published in Lanterns and Lances, 1961 or 1962

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“Editing should be […] a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, ‘How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?’ and avoid ‘How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?’”

—James Thurber, Collecting Myself, p. 12

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“that’s the trouble with becoming fully awake: a glory passes.”

—James Thurber, Collecting Myself, p. 21

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“”[Thurber] began sending funny prose to Harold Ross’s faltering new magazine, the New Yorker. The magazine sent them back. Finally the 21st piece Thurber submitted was accepted, and Ross, whose talent was being right for the wrong reasons, hired the young humorist—as managing editor. Since conversations with Ross were not always models of clarity, Thurber did not know he was managing editor until the end of the first week, when his secretary brought him the office payroll to sign. [After six months,] Ross gave up. ‘I guess you’re a writer,’ he said. ‘All right then, goddammit, write.’”

—from the editors’ preface to Thurber’s Lanterns and Lances. (The preface is signed “The Editors of Time,” which sounds like a much more unusual job than I suspect they really had.)

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From Thurber’s Foreword to The Thirteen Clocks:

“In the end they took the book away from me, on the ground that it was finished and that I was just having fun tinkering with clocks and running up and down secret stairs. They had me there.”

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“He was assuredly no ordinary man, that he could so disport himself on the morning of his execution.”

…and other sentences that are completely inappropriate for Wikipedia and are probably from a copyrighted source, but that are too good for me to be quite ready to delete them from Wikipedia.

(I think this was from a Wikipedia page about the song “McPherson’s Lament,” about Jamie Macpherson, but I think the page (and this sentence) are no longer in Wikipedia.)

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In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I was particularly struck by Mr. Tilney’s comments, shortly after being introduced, on the necessity of keeping a journal:

“[…] Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies’ ways as you wish to believe me[…]”

It seems things haven’t changed so much in the past two hundred years. Excepting only that now men can write journals too, and that we can all do so in public.

Tilney and Catherine proceed to discuss letter-writing:

“[…It] is this delightful habit of journaling which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.”

“I have sometimes thought,” said Catherine, doubtingly, “whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is—I should not think the superiority was always on our side.”

“As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.”

“And what are they?”

“A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.”

And here again we see that the passage of two centuries has brought us greater equality between the sexes, allowing men, too, to create written works with no more faults than those three.

Okay, I’m not being fair; in fact, the conversation in question concludes with a statement of gender equality:

“Upon my word! I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment. You do not think too highly of us in that way.”

“I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.”

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“This nut … while so many of its brethren have … been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel nut can be supposed capable of.”

—Jane Austen, Persuasion

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“Since most people are consumers of already-created promises, this guide will explain consumption of returned promises before explaining how to create them.”

—JavaScript documentation

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“Jean de Magnon, historiographer to the king of France, undertook to write an encyclopaedia in French heroic verse, which was to fill ten volumes of 20,000 lines each, and to render libraries merely a useless ornament. But he did not live to finish it[…]. The part he left was printed as La Science universelle, Paris, 1663 […]—10 books containing about 11,000 lines. They begin with the nature of God, and end with the history of the fall of man. His verses, say Chaudon and Delandine, are perhaps the most nerveless, incorrect, obscure and flat in French poetry”

—Britannica 11th edition, article on “Encyclopaedia”

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🎵 Others will fly in that tempting void that waits beyond the sky;

We’ll control the lightning once again.

—Jean Stevenson, “Dedication”

---

“yacc—the piece of code that understandeth all parsing”

—J.E.H. Shaw

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“It is possible to look for the inner light while playing pattycake; you just have to look a little harder.”

—Jen Post

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From the webcomic Questionable Content, by Jeph Jacques, comic 4912, “Pickup Lines.”

The context is that one character (Elliot, I think) is catastrophizing about his relationship; another character (Renee, I think) is trying to be sympathetic/supportive, but is realizing that Elliot is catastrophizing.

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“One thing I would like is a recut of a horror movie where every surprise is delightful. Like the girl finally decides to check out the weird noise coming from the basement, AND IT’S FOURTEEN HEDGEHOGS THROWING AN ICE CREAM SOCIAL”

—@jilltwiss

(See also some other such scenarios in comments on my Facebook post of this.)

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🎵 A, B, I, G, R, X, Q

M, Z, L, V, K-C-W

T, Y, F, H, U, E

N, S, P, O, J, D

Now I know my A-B-I’s

Next time you won’t be surprised!

—Jim Moskowitz and Bhadrika Love

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“…but no sooner did this bright luminary (the Press) burst upon Europe, than its brilliant rays, like the meridian sun, not only enlightened and invigorated mankind, but also dispelled the murky clouds which had for ages cemented the bonds of Ignorance and Superstition.”

—J. Johnson, printer, in Typographia

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Someone talking about what would happen to the Earth if the sun suddenly stopped existing:

“Now I’m no physicist … [but] the momentum of the earth … traveling in a circle … might keep it in a curve for a bit….”

—JJ Varley

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“It is so much better inventing a whole new world—just the way you want it—than doing the jobs that are waiting to be done… The very thought of all those awful little jobs is enough to make one sit down and write ‘Once upon a time—’”

—Joan Aiken, in Cricket, March 1977, as quoted in The Fantastic Imagination II

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“…Miss Winstable, [Jane’s governess,] whose first impulse, on hearing about any course of action proposed by her charges, was to forbid it, on grounds of impropriety, or rashness, or unladylikeness, or any slightest tincture of those dread possibilities. —Or, simply, on the principle that the young should be continually thwarted and chastened.”

—Jane Fairfax, by Joan Aiken, p. 56

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Joanna Russ on fitting writing in around the rest of her life, especially disability:

Writing has to be fitted around everything, everything. Teaching, friends, business correspondence, love, laundry, food, shopping. I have at least one or two medical appointments a week, sometimes three or four. And one marathon week it was five. I have constantly to ration my sitting and my standing and switch from one pain to another. It’s always a matter for calculating: shall I continue and know I’ll hurt for a week or two? Or stop? Or try handwriting? (How bad is my arthritis and will it get worse?) There are sieges of other illnesses, usually the result of medications, and then sometimes I can’t write for months. (Two years recently.) So I’m always juggling illnesses, energies and time. Having to live with disabilities is like running a small business.

—from a piece in Women’s Review of Books, July 1989 (reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen, p. 243)

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In a letter to Lesbian Ethics in 1987, Joanna Russ writes about suddenly understanding why some other lesbians had had a hard time classifying her as butch or femme.

(I’m sure that some aspects of the following don’t match some of y’all’s Jewish experience; think of it as Russ’s personal experience rather than as a universal statement about Jewish people.)

I was a child during World War II and […] grew up a third-generation [Ashkenazi] in a […] community in New York City.

[…]

I have just realized that when I was called ‘male-identified’ (by other lesbians) or ‘femme,’ what the lesbians around me were perceiving wasn’t the same split I made between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ because theirs was Gentile. Mine was Jewish.

No man fixed cars or was athletic in my neighborhood; no man I knew ever fought physically with another. To the first- and second-generation shtetl descendants around me, what was reserved to men, and what made them superior to women, was […] intellectuality, scholarship, and religion, all activities denied women. The third-generation Jewish boys I knew at college were quite viciously sexist, but it never would have occurred to them to claim a monopoly on cars or athletics; what they claimed for their own was poetry, philosophy, science and fiction, all the things I loved the most.

(Reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen, p. 284)

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Department of “be careful what you wish for”:

Joanna Russ, in her author’s note after her story in the anthology Epoch, 1975, wrote (among other things):

“My own, quixotic dream for the paperback-book industry is a giant Sears-Roebuck-ish, centralized store which will carry remaindered books at lowered (or raised) prices (depending on their bibliographic value and the rise due to inflation) and have wee beautiful catalogs in every hamlet, village, and town where people (now that the movies are too expensive) can go when TV palls and find old Phyllis Whitney gothics (Look! I found a copy of Fear in the Old Castle!) or HPL (Look! Horrible Monsters from Old New England!) or controversial books (How can anybody bear to talk about such filthy things in public? I’ll buy it.), order them (see? no problems with shelf space), pay for them, and get them (quickly). The books would move only when paid for, copies would not be shredded (as they are now when they’re not sold within about ten days).”

(She also added, a bit later: “The real problems are distribution and information.”)

---

“too many typical science fiction horror stories are not the universal dystopias they pretend to be, but rather the unhappy wails of privilege-coming-to-an-end. Take, for example, the usual Overpopulation Story, in which Americans have to live without private ranch houses, or the typical Pollution Story in which far too often the real gripe is that ‘we’ must subsist on soybeans and vegetable starch […] or the Violence Story which deplores the fact (as someone recently pointed out) that violence is becoming democratized.”

—Joanna Russ, F&SF book review column, 1974. (Reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen, p. 97.)

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Paul studied a sign hung on the wall of the booth, directing explicitly and anonymously just how to remove reciever,insert coin, listen for dialtone and dial.

I did all that, he thought, but nobody tells me how to go on from there.

—Joanna Russ, “Beach Plum” (unpublished; written c. 1953, when Russ was about 16)

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“I wrote this play—only full length play I’ve ever done—my last yr. at Yale (59-60) in order to get out of the damned place.”

“no other copy extant, thank God”

—Joanna Russ, handwritten note on title page of typescript of her play The Death of Alexander the Great

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Two girls talking, at a girls’ boarding school:

“I just get so damn sick of fashion and ladyness and all that crap”

“It’s not crap”

“It is so. I wish I was a lamp-post. Next to a boy it’s the best thing I can think of being”

—Joanna Russ, from The Sensible Fish (the unpublished novel she started at age 16 and finished at 20), ch. 2

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Russ on dying people:

“One thing dying people usually know, if they have any sense left, is what they want; and that is so rare in the human condition that it commands a certain kind of respect. Although I suppose they may know what they want only because there‘s so little left to choose from that the task‘s easy.”

—We Who Are About To…, p. 66 (day twelve)

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Russ on tanks and violence:

“And if you capture a tank, what can you use it for except what a tank does? You can‘t plant a garden with it.”

—We Who Are About To…, p. 143

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“They proceed with their irrelevancies intently and resolutely, and there is a strange flourish of triumph when they have reached the end and gotten nowhere.”

—Joe Adamson, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo

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“Is there any chance that the stories will continue in this century? (What a convienient phrase, we should end centuries more often.)”

—Joe Mucchiello

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Regarding “inexpensive Signet and Mentor books” (which I think just means they’re talking about mass-market paperbacks): “The inexpensive book, widely sold to readers everywhere, is completing the revolution which Gutenberg began.”

—“The Publishers” of New World Writing, a sort of paperback literary magazine, in 1952

I’m intrigued by the notion of mass-market publishing being a continuation of Gutenberg’s work—and by the statement that that revolution was complete, which maybe we should take as a warning not to believe that our own era of publishing is the final end of mass publication.

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🎵 One by one, side by side

We will stand and face the fire; there’s no turning back this tide

Stone by stone, day by day

We will make the great walls crumble, and the borders fade away.

—John McCutcheon, “Stone by Stone”

---

John McCutcheon got a guitar as a gift for his 14th birthday. To learn how to play, he went to the library to get a book about it. Here’s the story he tells:

“I found the only book in our library that was under the Dewey Decimal System subject ‘guitar.’ And it was a tattered black and white paperback book entitled Woody Guthrie Folk Songs. And I had no idea who Woody Guthrie was—like most American kids I grew up singing the songs, but in school they never tell you who’s writing the songs that they’re teaching you. And because I thought this was a guitar instruction book, I faithfully started on page 1, assuming it was arranged in ascending order of difficulty. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize, no, it was alphabetical. And so probably the first thirty songs I learned were from that book. Woody Guthrie songs. And it was telling—because it was alphabetical, not thematic, not, as I thought, in ascending order of difficulty, here was a love song followed by a topical song followed by an historical song followed by a kids’ song followed by a funny song and an angry song, and it was really remarkable, and it was teaching me not only how to play the guitar but how to be a writer. That you write about everything for everyone.”

(Transcribed by me from what McCutcheon said during a recent online hammer dulcimer concert.)

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A song of hope: a couple of verses of John McCutcheon’s “Wish You Goodnight” (YouTube)

🎵 All the songs and tales from across the ages

That have raised our eyes and our hearts to a loftier sight

Are a port of calm while the battles rages

And I wish you good dreams, good morrow, and I wish you good night.

[…]

So gather ’round, all you friends and lovers;

Let the darkness come, for the fire is bright.

Though the road is long, love makes us stronger,

And I wish you good dreams, good morrow, and I wish you good night.

---

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”

—John Milton

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John Rogers’s “three questions of drama”:

1. Who wants what?

2. Why can’t they have it?

3. Why do I give a shit?

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“each screenplay is like a snowflake: unique and ultimately destined for a slush pile.”

—John Rogers

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“I feel I ought to do my part in helping machines take over the arts and sciences, leaving us with plenty of leisure time for important things, like extracting square roots and figuring pay rolls.”

—sf author John Sladek, as quoted by David Langford in a 1982 interview with Sladek

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The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

—John Updike, from “Cosmic Gall”

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Excerpts from an interview with the designers of a font called Priori. In these, I’ll use initials to indicate speakers: UI for the Unnamed Interviewer, JB for designer Jonathan Barnbrook, MLA for designer Marcus Leis Allion. Single square brackets are in the original; double square brackets are my clarifications and elisions.

About legibility and communicating with your audience:

[[UI:]] A lot of the work in the 1990s was hard to read.

MLA: But that might have been its purpose—to confuse, confound or question. That’s what I think [[our]] studio does so well. It always questions those notions, all those assumptions, rather than dismissing them. When Helvetica is credited as being the most legible typeface, we need to ask: who is claiming this? We should also look for other motivations that govern aesthetic decisions.

For example, the Haas type foundry employed Max Miedinger to create a typeface that would compete with the new 1950s interpretations of Akzidenz Grotesk [a sans serif originally released in 1896]. Even the name was changed, from ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ to ‘Helvetica’, in order to make it easier to market. Then there was the demand for a visual consistency, which was not instigated by modernism’s universal ideal, but by the corporations that began to expand across the world.

JB: It depends what you mean by legible. It may not be legible to you. There are plenty of examples where people have done something which is maybe not as legible as you might want, but the message still reaches its audience. There are so many different ways that people read in different types of design.

MLA: But this whole notion also suggests that legibility is out there somewhere and that it’s attainable as a form in itself, if you can master it, rather than looking at the cultural aspects.

[[UI:]] But isn’t there a sense that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to legibility?

JB: I don’t think we do. We assume that we do. Get those notions of scientific legibility out of your head! Some people find text completely illegible if it doesn’t interest them. If the message isn’t open to a particular audience, they won’t read it.

Regarding political/“aggressive” typeface designs:

[[UI:]] Do you think anger is a big part of that?

[[…]]

MLA: By presenting certain ideas as being angry or aggressive, it’s possible to dismiss work that challenges the dominant ideology.

Similar notions have been employed to explain and curtail the actions of others[[…]]. I think it’s much more interesting to pose and pursue questions that destabilize foundations. They represent openings, rather than simple closings.

Regarding avoiding working with clients who you don’t approve of:

JB: [[…]] When we turned down a major corporation recently, we sent them a list of reasons why, along with web links, and they phoned up the next morning and asked if the email was a joke.

[[UI:]] What did you say to them?

MLA: Well, it was a question of pointing out the corporate relationships they endorsed and actively engaged with, and how destructive their business practices were to many disenfranchised and impoverished people. Obviously we’re all implicated to some degree in the relationships of capital, but we should seek to challenge that where we can. It’s not the sort of thing that comes to the fore in graphic design very often. Even less so in typographic design.

—from How to design a Typeface, published by the Design Museum in 2010, pp, 83-88

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A couple of bits about bisexuality from Jonathan Black’s article “Gay Liberation: Out of the Closets and into the Streets,” from Defiance #2, 1971:

“Perhaps it is only our sexual programming, but it is a rarity for a person to be turned on to men and women simultaneously. Switching from men to women sequentially is more common; we still appear to be most excited when our sexual energy is channeled into one sex at a time.” [Speak for yourself, Jonathan!]

“It is nevertheless tempting for straights to employ the prophylactic of bisexuality in confronting the threat of the gay movement.” […I only have a vague idea of what he means here, based on the paragraph that follows it, which I’m not going to quote. But I was amused by the phrase “the prophylactic of bisexuality.”]

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“Experience is useless without memory and mindfulness.”

—Jon Carroll, Apr. 1, 1998

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“Please, let the healing begin, right after I have the last word.”

—Jon Carroll, Feb. 17, 1999

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“The important thing is to have a life where many odd things happen.”

—Jon Carroll, Jun. 16, 1999

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“The energy free lunch that we have been eating for so long has finally risen up in its proverbial splendor: ‘There is no such thing as me! Pay for the lunch!’”

—Jon Carroll, Jan. 29, 2001

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“True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.”

—Joseph Addison, The Spectator, March 17, 1911 (as quoted in Tam Lin, I think)

(Yes, yes, for many people that’s not true happiness. For that matter, it’s often not for me either. But it often is.)

---

At some point, someone interviewed Jude Law about the Sherlock Holmes movies in which he co-starred with Robert Downey, Jr. The following exchange ensued:

(That may not be an entirely accurate quote—I saw another version of that exchange that was a little different—but I like this version so I’m sticking with it.)

One more quote while I’m here, this time from Downey: “I think the word bromance is so passé. We are two men who happen to be roommates who wrestle a lot and share a bed.”

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🎵 As long as the mushroom clouds don’t rise

Above our own suburban skies,

We can pretend that the peace dove flies

And that the revolution’s here.

—Judy Small, ”The Revolution’s Here”

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🎵 These are the people of our time no less than those whose names and

Faces grace our papers’ pages and our TV screens,

People on whose labor in the shadows we have built our lives,

Who get none of the glory and who bear most of the pain.

—Judy Small, “How Many Times”

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K

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“The heroes were always the ordinary people who pursued extraordinary change.”

—Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

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“I like to challenge the expectations of story. I like to challenge the way I was taught language. I like to tear it down and remake it, because I see, so often, that what I was served up on a plate was, so often, in service to someone else’s narrative, to someone else’s wish for what the world would be—a world that did not include me, or people like me, a world that pretended we never existed at all.”

—Kameron Hurley, “Tea, Bodies, and Business: Remaking the Hero Archetype,” as reprinted in The Geek Feminist Revolution, p. 97

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Turns out that Karel Čapek, coiner of the word “robot,” was also a gardener, according to Lewis Gannett’s introduction to Čapek’s War with the Newts.

“’Let none think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation,’ he wrote in The Gardener’s Year, which appeared in the United States in 1931. ’It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.’”

And this is Čapek’s “gardener’s prayer,” as also given in Gannett’s intro (not sure who it was translated by):

“O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, but, You see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in; grant that at the same time it shall not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthemum, lavender and the others which You, in Your infinite wisdom, know are drought-loving plants—I will write their names on a bit of paper if You like—and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not everywhere (not, for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily and rhododendron), and not too much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant-lice and snails, no mildew, and that once a week thin liquid manure may fall down from heaven. Amen.”

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—R.U.R., by Karel Čapek, act I

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🎵 They say life’s a journey, a highway from birth to death,

Mapped in despair and traveled in hopelessness.

Well, they may believe it, but just between you and me,

The trick to the traveling is all in the company.

—“It’s a Pleasure to Know You,” by Karl Williams (I like the version of the tune as sung by the Short Sisters)

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“What if? […] Why not? […] Could it be?” said Leo. […]

“Enough,” said Gloria.

“No,” said Leo Matienne, “not enough. Never enough. We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?”

—The Magician’s Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo, pp. 142–143

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“At first I thought I’d keep everything just as he left it, but I see now that was wrong. Nothing can stay as we leave it; all we can hope is that someone who loves us will put away our playthings tenderly.”

—Christine Forrest (played by Katharine Hepburn) in Keeper of the Flame, about her recently-deceased husband

(But the husband in question was a fascist, which makes this quote less generally useful than I would like.)

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An excerpt from early on in Kelly Link’s excellent 1996 story “Travels with the Snow Queen.” Content warning for vivid images of foot injuries, and semi-metaphorical eye and heart injuries.

Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.

There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the shards of the Snow Queen’s looking-glass out of your feet, you remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when Kay’s eyes, Kay’s heart were pierced by shards of the same mirror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.

---

During the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London, architect Christopher Wren “asked three bricklayers what they were doing. The first bricklayer responded, ‘I’m working.’ The second said, ‘I’m building a wall.’ The third […] said, ‘I’m building a cathedral to the Almighty.’”

“[…] Each bricklayer cared about something different, even though all three were working on the same thing.”

—from Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, by Kim Scott, p. 51

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“There are only two majors at Swarthmore: Swarthmore and engineering. And most of the engineering majors are minoring in Swarthmore anyway.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (paraphrased)

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L

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“Walking home in the rain. The swish of tires on wet pavement. All the snow is melting. What better to break ice than its own self?”

—LaShawn M. Wanak

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NSFW excerpt from a 1974 Laurie Anderson piece, As:If:

In 1971, I tried to seduce someone through a door. This guy was going out with my roommate and I wanted to sleep with him. He would come over to our apartment and they would go into her room, shut the door, and start to make love. Then I would get my violin and go into the living room, which was next to her bedroom, and play Tschaikovsky.

I hoped he would hear me and recognize how sensitive, and sensual, I was and want to be with me instead of her.

ON TAPE: FIRST 30 BARS OF TSCHAIKOVSKY VIOLIN CONCERTO PLAYED BY OISTRACH; THEN A PRE-RECORDED TAPE OF PERFORMER PLAYING SAME PASSAGE.

The only thing I didn’t count on was that it sounded one way when Oistrach played it, another way when I played it, and still another way when it was coming through a door while fucking.

—Stories from the Nerve Bible, p. 32

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For “Duets on Ice,” a performance in the 1970s, Laurie Anderson played her violin while standing in ice skates whose blades were frozen into blocks of ice. “When the ice melted and I lost my balance, the concert was over.”

She adds:

“In between songs I talked about the parallels between ice skating and violin playing: blades over a surface, balance, simultaneity, the constant state of imbalance followed by balance followed by imbalance, like walking, like music, like everything.”

—Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible, p. 40

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“At the time, I was very adamant that performances couldn’t and shouldn’t be documented. I thought that since my performances were about memory, the best way to record them was in other people’s memories. Then I realized that other people didn’t remember them very well at all.”

—Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible, p. 109

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“Eventually, [film] editing began to seep into my daily life. I’d be sitting in a restaurant talking with someone and suddenly I’d look around and think, ‘Wait a second! This isn’t very well lit! I wonder if we have any other coverage of this?’ Or worse, ‘Who wrote this anyway?’”

—Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible, p. 224

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From Happy All the Time, by Laurie Colwin, published in 1978 (pp. 46–47 of the hardcover edition). After an awkward quasi-date, Vincent kissed Misty and then fled; now he’s invited her out to dinner to attempt to apologize, and the following conversation ensues:

“Did you actually drag me out to dinner to tell me that you didn’t mean to kiss me?” She was still smiling.

“I’m sorry,” said Vincent. “I was just being conversational.”

“Conversational about kissing?” said Misty. “Very interesting.”

“What I meant to say is that I wanted to kiss you, but I didn’t mean to.”

“Well, that certainly clears things up,” said Misty. “You and I seem to have very different ideas about intent and about kissing.”

“I mean, you can’t just go around kissing people,” said Vincent.

“You did,” said Misty.

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“Love, he reflected, was not at all like science. It seemed unfair to him that there was nowhere one might research except to go to the thing itself.”

—from Laurie Colwin’s 1978 novel Happy All the Time, p. 87

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An exchange between Guido (one of the male leads) and his new secretary Stanley, who’s taking a leave of absence from being a college student:

Stanley wrote a rapid, legible hand. He made excellent coffee. He loved to answer the telephone because of the groovy voices and he did in fact type like a demon. Shortly before lunch, he presented Guido with a stack of typed letters. All the w’s had been left out and were written in an Italic hand.

“Is the w key on that typewriter broken?” Guido asked.

“No, man. It’s a little device I made up from going crazy typing term papers. See, you pick a letter and then you leave it out and then you write it in. It’s a little challenge. I discovered it when I was on ups.”

“Ups?” said Guido.

“Speed,” said Stanley. “You know, amphetamines and stuff. All us young persons used to do it. My mind was turning into pea soup, so I stopped. But you discover some really weird stuff, like what I call ’the left-out-letter syndrome.’”

—from Laurie Colwin’s 1978 novel Happy All the Time, pp. 100–101

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“Edgar Wallace [was the] author of 170 novels, twelve of them in one year alone. […] He needed money and he wrote his very successful mysteries fast. There’s a joke that a caller was told Mr Wallace couldn’t come to the phone because he was at the midpoint of writing his next novel. ‘Midpoint?’ said the caller. ‘I’ll hold.’”

—Laurie Graham, from a blog post

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"Skaith's old ginger-colored sun was going down in a senile fury of crimson and molten brass, laying streaks of unhealthy brilliance across the water."

—Leigh Brackett, The Ginger Star, p. 5

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Leon R. Kass tells off those of us who are so shameless (nay, uncivilized (nay, unhuman!)) as to lick ice-cream cones in full public view of other people:

[…] eating is out of place in public, except at those public occasions explicitly convened to include it (like public festivals) or in those public places set aside for eating (like restaurants or picnic areas). A man eating as he walks down the street eats in the face of all passersby, who must then either avert their gaze or observe him objectifiedly in the act. Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice-cream cone—a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know why eating in public is offensive.

I fear that I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many readers, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the (not-only-Talmudic) view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America’s rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing customs—their reasons long before forgotten—that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small but telling example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and “naturally”), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street—even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat—displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It betokens enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one’s food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

—Leon R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (1999), pp. 148-149

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🎵 Though we’ve nothing but our voices, yet our voices make us strong,

Turn despair into defiance and defiance into song.

—from “The Power of Song,” by Leon Rosselson

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Lester del Rey on the impact on the field of C. L. Moore’s 1933 story “Shambleau”:

Back in the fall of 1933, I opened the November issue of Weird Tales to find a story with the provocative but meaningless title “Shambleau,” by an unknown writer named C. L. Moore—and life was never quite the same afterward. Up to that time, science-fiction readers had accepted the mechanistic and unemotional stories of other worlds and future times without question. After the publication of Moore’s story, however, the bleakness of such writing would never again be satisfactory.

[…]

It is probably impossible to explain to modern readers how great an impact that first C. L. Moore story had. Science fiction has learned a great deal from her many examples. But if you could go back to the old science-fiction magazines of the time and read a few issues, and then turn to “Shambleau” for the first time, you might begin to understand. The influences of that story were and are tremendous.

Here, for the first time in the field, we find mood, feeling, and color. Here is an alien who is truly alien—far different from the crude monsters and slightly-altered humans found in other stories. Here are rounded and well-developed characters. Northwest Smith, for instance, is neither a good guy nor a bad guy—he may be slightly larger than life, but he displays all aspects of humanity. In “Shambleau” we also experience as never before both the horror at what we may find in space and the romance of space itself. And—certainly for the first time that I can remember in the field—this story presents the sexual drive of humanity in some of its complexity.

—from del Rey’s 1975 introduction to The Best of C. L. Moore

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He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,

With his name painted clearly on each:

But since he omitted to mention the fact,

They were all left behind on the beach.

—Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

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Lewis Carroll on digression:

“I have wandered from the point: that is a peculiarity, if I may be permitted to say so, incidental to life; and, as I remarked on an occasion which time will not suffer me more fully to specify, ‘What, after all, is life?’ nor did I find any one of the individuals present (we were a party of nine, including the waiter, and it was while the soup was being removed that the above-recorded observation was made) capable of furnishing me with a rational answer to the question.”

—from “Novelty and Romancement” (1856)

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In 1974 or so, Lewis Thomas wrote an interesting essay titled “Computers,” which he reprinted in his book The Lives of a Cell. The whole essay is interesting, but I especially like this bit:

Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room. And even so, they would all have to be wired together, intricately and delicately, as we are, communicating with each other, talking incessantly, listening. If they weren’t at each other this way, all their waking hours, they wouldn’t be anything like human, after all. I think we’re safe, for a long time ahead.

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. We won’t be able to construct machines like ourselves until we’ve understood this, and we’re not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.

The first paragraph seems to get quoted a lot for both its prescience and its lack of prescience; he seemed to think that we would get a single powerful AI before we had networking. (Which really probably just means he didn’t anticipate Moore’s Law; it looks like he thought that building multiple powerful computers would be too expensive. Well, and he also didn’t anticipate the Internet, nor how hard AI would turn out to be.) The second paragraph seems to get quoted a lot in more philosophical contexts, with a focus on human communication instead of on computers. I like the juxtaposition of the two paragraphs, as they appeared in the original essay.

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🎵 For the train today to Morrow, if the schedule it is right,

Today it goes to Morrow, and returns tomorrow night.

—from “To Morrow,” by Lew Sully

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—Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda

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“It was a small dragon,” admitted Glew. “About the size of a weasel. […] I would have slain it,” he added, with a huge, rattling sigh. “I tried. But the vicious thing bit me. I still carry the marks.”

—Lloyd Alexander, The Castle of Llyr

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“There is much to be known, and above all much to be loved, be it the turn of the seasons or the shape of a river pebble. Indeed, the more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.”

—Adaon, The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

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🎵 My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine,

But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

—Lloyd Stone, “A Song of Peace,” also known as “This is my song” (my understanding is that these words were part of the original poem, which was later set to the music of Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia”)

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“To dispel the tedium of his life as a promiscuous dissipated expatriate, [Lord Byron] began [writing] Don Juan in the summer of 1818…”

—from an explanatory card at the Pierpont Morgan Library, I think

(In case any of you were looking for a way to dispel similar tedium.)

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“Away we go, Oho, oho, oho

A drop of rum for you and me

And the world’s as round as the letter O

And round it runs the sea.”

—Lord Dunsany

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—The Lost City

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“It is an excellent plan to have some place where we can go to be quiet, when things vex or grieve us.”

—Marmee, in Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

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“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understandings.”

—Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

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In [PKD’s] books, people muddle through their lives, coping with the cold awfulness of it all as best they can, and await their deliverance—push for it—and then recoil in horror when it comes, because it’s always a hell of a lot heavier than they bargained for.

[…] Dick’s perception of the way the universe worked stood in direct contradition to the rational Campbellian worldview, which held that all things are ultimately knowable and thus controllable. […] Dick never claimed to have the answers, and he wasn’t too sure about his questions, either.

[…] As the sixties washed over us, […] Dick’s vision of a universe out of control began resonating more closely with the world-at-large (or, to use his own preferred Pre-Socratic terminology: his ‘idios kosmos’ or personal reality [came more into] phase with the ‘koinos kosmos’ or shared, objective reality).

[…] In a letter written in June of 1969 […], Dick said: ‘In virtually all of my books the protagonist is suffering from a breakdown of his idios kosmos—at least we hope that’s what’s breaking down, not the koinos kosmos. […] we must have our idios kosmos to stay sane.’

—from Lou Stathis’s 1984 Afterword to Dick’s Time Out of Joint

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In Kalethea: A Peep into the Realms of Poesy, a 1926 collection of poems by my grandfather’s grandfather, L.P. Venen, I like this metaphor, from the beginning of a poem called “My Telescope” (p. 50):

As when in some renowned old library,

I strive to catch the titles vague and dim

Of books piled high, my strong arm aideth me,

So doth my goodly telescope go forth

To search among the upper shelves in God’s

Great reading room for tomes that he hath placed

So high.

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“The apparently universal avatar for the science fiction enthusiast is an adolescent boy who is mad for gimmicks and all things mechanical. This avatar has been with us since the days of Hugo Gernsback and is the reason people continually repeat the cliché that the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve. I’d like to propose a complementary avatar, at least as old: that of the woman passionately interested in challenging the way things are, passionately determined to understand how everything works.”

—L. Timmel Duchamp, from “For a Genealogy of Feminist SF: Reflections on Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction, 1818–1960,” as reprinted in The Grand Conversation

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M

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“The early media moguls were idea merchants who knew that technological innovation … [was] the means of reaching readers but that editorial content was the key to attracting and keeping readers.”

—Madeline Rogers

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From the Wikipedia entry on the fictional crime syndicate known as the Maggia, from Marvel Comics:

Its structure is somewhat similar to the Mafia[…], but the Maggia differs in that it frequently hires supervillains and mad scientists to work for them.

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“[Brothers] that choose … one another … have a chance to turn out better than…brothers born to the same father and mother, [who] have to do the best they can with just their own blood kin.”

—Silver John, in a story by Manly Wade Wellman

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Marc Roskin, an exec producer and director on Leverage, talking about the big shootout scene in “The Big Bang Job” (s3e15), and the fact that they didn’t show blood in that scene:

“There’s this thing called Standards and Practices, where they really won’t let you have blood, or nudity. [Roskin pauses for a beat. The other guy on camera starts to say something, but Roskin continues.] That woulda been kinda weird, if everyone was naked in that scene.”

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“[She used] taunts and blandishments. …I wish we still had blandishments. They sound so useful.”

—Margaret Atwood, speaking about Alias Grace

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“We kept hoping this insanity could not continue. A government that was mad? Who could believe it. Business as usual, propaganda, some violence, but surely it would stop there. Surely the other powers would not permit what the Nazis said they were going to do to us. We kept expecting Hitler to begin to act like a sane government. He has the big industrial barons behind him now, we told each other, they will make him relent. The Krupps, the Farbens, they don’t want to tear the country apart. If they insist, he will leave us in peace. During the Olympic Games, things seemed to be mellowing. We kept hoping. Every so often we or our friends would go and investigate emigration, but nobody would give us visas. The British wouldn’t let us in Palestine and didn’t want us in England and the United States didn’t want Jews. But after Kristallnacht, we had no hope, no illusion. We ran. We left our dead in the earth we had lived on for centuries, and we ran.”

—from Gone to Soldiers, by Marge Piercy

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“Let no one tell me that silence gives consent, because whoever is silent dissents.”

—Maria Isabel Barreno

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“What a pity that we cannot take dye stuff from the stars, so as to create a new brilliancy in fashion.”

—Maria Mitchell, astronomer (1818-1889), as quoted in the play Out of Our Fathers’ House, which was “arranged for the stage” by Eve Merriam, Paula Wagner, and Jack Hofsiss

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On arithmetic:

July 1878.

I am nearly driven wild with the Dorcas accounts, and by Mrs. Wakefield’s orders they are to be done now. I do hate sums. There is no greater mistake than to call arithmetic an exact science. There are Permutations and Aberrations discernible to minds entirely noble like mine; subtle variations which ordinary accountants fail to discover; hidden laws of Number which it requires a mind like mine to perceive. For instance, if you add a sum from the bottom up, and then again from the top down, the result is always different. Again if you multiply a number by another number before you have had your tea, and then again after, the product will be different. It is also remarkable that the Post-tea product is more likely to agree with other people’s calculations than the Pre-tea result.

Try the experiment, and if you do not find it as I say, you are a mere sciolist, a poor mechanical thinker, and not gifted as I am, with subtle perceptions.

Of course I find myself not appreciated as an accountant. Mrs. Wakefield made me give up the book to Rose and her governess (who are here), and was quite satisfied with the work of those inferior intellects.

—Maria Price La Touche, from her 1908 book The Letters of a Noble Woman

(I think I saw someone refer to the book as a novel, but when I look at it in Google Books, it looks like a nonfiction collection of letters.)

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“Readers look for information the way wild animals forage for food—seeking good-enough information that takes the least effort to find and digest. The Web [makes] information foraging easier, and therefore people spend less time struggling with difficult content. They prefer short information snacks, which are best provided by Every Page is Page One topics.”

—from the “expanded outline” in Mark Baker’s 2013 book Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web

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“It was at this time that I concluded to sell my soul to Satan. Steel was away down, so was St. Paul; it was the same with all the desirable stocks, in fact, and so, if I did not turn out to be away down myself, now was my time to raise a stake and make my fortune.”

—Mark Twain, “Sold to Satan” (1923?)

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[He] informed me that he was a page.

“Go ’long,” I said; “you ain’t more than a paragraph.”

—Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

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Description of a particular woman’s speech pattern, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The narrator kind of mocks this woman for the way she talks for most of the book, but I rather liked the way this instance (halfway through the book) turned out:

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

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Long quote from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, an impassioned cri de cœur about government and monarchy and freedom. I copied and pasted the following paragraphs from an online edition of the book. I found the second paragraph below, about the French Revolution, especially compelling, but am providing the other paragraphs as well, for context.

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; […300 words of detailed listing of bad stuff that the lords did to the peasants elided here by Jed…]; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop’s road three days each—gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal-wave of blood—one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man’s hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families—including the voter’s; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation’s families—including his own.

They all looked unhit, and said they didn’t know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn’t ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one—and that it would last until it had an Established Church. Again they were all unhit—at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he brought his fist down and said he didn’t believe a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:

“This one’s a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of government.”

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient.”

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.

And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal. The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left. I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself. Wherefore, the “deal” which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was of a quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.

…I feel that I should note that I don’t endorse the idea that violent revolution is necessarily the best response to oppression. But I thought that was a pretty powerfully written piece nonetheless.

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Some excerpts from Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

…

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

…

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

…

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

…

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

…

… the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. … We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

…

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

…

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

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“Not having leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game[…]”

—Mary Wollstonecraft, criticizing Edmund Burke, in a note about why she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men

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“Glorious,” said Steerpike, “is a dictionary word. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. In dead and shackled language, my dears, you are glorious, but oh, to give vent to a brand new sound that might convince you of what I really think of you, as you sit there in your purple splendor, side by side! But no, it is impossible. Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia. Dead words defy me. I can make no sound, dear ladies, that is apt.”

“You could try,” said Clarice. “We aren’t busy.”

—Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan, p. 305 of the most common paperback edition

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Some bits of Mervyn Peake:

“Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other—other than this umbrageous legacy.”

“Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of red rust: to rituals‘ footprints ankle-deep in stone.”

“He has learned an alphabet of arch and aisle: the language of dim stairs and moth-hung rafters.”

“Is Time’s cold scroll recoiling on itself until the dead years speak, or is it in the throb of now that the specters wake and wander through the walls?”

“There was a Library and it is ashes. […] Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armored with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances, clamped though it is in midnight.”

“[…] he mourns through each languid gesture, each fine-boned feature, as though his body were glass and at its center his inverted heart like a pendent tear.”

—all from pp. 1–3 of Gormenghast

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Suppose one is writing a book, and one writes the sentence “He had entered a disused chimney at ground level.”

If one were a mere mortal, one might follow that with a prosaic sentence like “The chimney contained a set of small mirrors that he used to spy on people in the rooms above.”

But if one were Mervyn Peake, one might instead follow with a sentence like this one:

“It was very dark, and this darkness was not so much mitigated as intensified by a series of little shining mirrors that held the terminal reflections of what was going on in those rooms which, one above the other, flanked the high chimneylike funnel that rose from where the young man stood in the darkness to where the high air meandered over the weather-broken roofs, which, rough and cracked as stale bread, blushed horribly in the prying rays of sundown.”

—Gormenghast, p. 13

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tired: gender binary

wired: building gender from source

—@metapianycist@queer.party, 2018

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“We can go to these universes where you go, ‘That’s crazy, that’s outrageous, that’s totally out there, it’s not possible’—but the intensity of the emotions, the sincerity of the love, or confusion, or heartbreak, it’s so tangible and so real that you believe it.”

—Michelle Yeoh, in a making-of segment from Everything Everywhere All at Once (“Putting Everything on the Bagel: Cooking Up the Multiverse”)

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“[W]hat with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.”

—Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes, ch. 1, trans. John Ormsby

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“May all your good dreams and fine wishes come true.”

—Mike Jittlov, The Wizard of Speed and Time

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“[…] everything that recalls the O, the zero or the circle, [evokes] the vulval ring.”

[…]

“The women say that the feminaries give pride of place to the symbols of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero, the sphere. They say that this series of symbols has provided them with a guideline to decipher a collection of legends they have found in the library and which they have called the cycle of the Grail. These are to do with the quests to recover the Grail undertaken by a number of personages. They say it is impossible to mistake the symbolism of the Round Table that dominated their meetings. They say that […] the quests for the Grail were singular unique attempts to describe the zero the circle the ring the spherical cup containing the blood.”

—Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, pp. 14 and 45 (translated by Peter Owen)

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“The Census Bureau, they count you every 10 years. WHAT DO THEY DO THE OTHER 9 YEARS?”

—Morry Taylor, as quoted by Dave Barry, 2/17/96

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“The rain … pounded on the black bowl of the umbrella as if it wanted to come in out of itself.”

—Natalie Babbitt, Goody Hall

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“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”

—Nathaniel S. Borenstein, as quoted in various places

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Nichelle Nichols on naming Uhura and on getting the part (transcribed by me from a making-of segment on the ST:TOS Blu-ray set, at the end of s2):

They hadn’t written Uhura. It was taken from a book I was reading, which was this marvelous treatise on Africa called Uhuru, which is the Swahili word for freedom. Later, when I got the part, [there] was no part to read. So I read the part of Mr. Spock. I said, “Well, could Spock be a woman?”

[They] told me […] Leonard Nimoy was already playing [Spock], and it’s Mr Spock. I said, “Well could it be?” and they said, “Yeah, but Leonard Nimoy wouldn’t like it.” So still I read for it, and they explained to me what kind of character [Spock] was, and I brought those given circumstances to the reading. And it was a nice long scene, it was Spock, Kirk, and Bones, so here I was with these guys—somebody else of course read [Kirk’s and McCoy’s parts]—and when I finished, there was silence, and finally someone said, “Why don’t we have Penny call downstairs and see if Leonard Nimoy has signed his contract yet.” [Laughs.] And that was their charming way of telling me I was going to play [a] character [on the show].

So Gene, for celebration, and the director and a couple others, took me to lunch, and he said, “I want to talk to you about that book,” which we had been chatting about. He said, “I like that word ’uhuru,’ and I’ve been wondering what to make this character. And I’m thinking why not from the United States of Africa?” I said, “I think that’s beautiful.” He said, “But I want to use that name Uhuru, but it’s a little hard, it’s a little—” And I said, “Well, instead of Uhuru, why don’t we make it Uhura?” He said, “I love it.” I said, “Which will it be, last name or first name?” and Gene said, “Let’s hold off on that, I’m not sure, it’s gotta be the right thing, but right now you’re Uhura,” and I said, “All right, I love that.”

And it wasn’t until [some time] later that a writer writing the history of Star Trek, the original series, called Gene and said, “What is Uhura’s—is that a first or last name?” and Gene said, “We never decided.” And [the writer] said, “Well, because it’s […] Uhuru, freedom, what about that being the last name, because I think I have a beautiful Swahili name for her first name.” Gene said, “What is it?” He said, “Nyota.” Gene said, “That’s beautiful. What does it mean?” He said, “It means star.” Gene […] could have said “Yes, that’s beautiful, Nyota Uhura,” [but instead he] said, “Well, Nichelle created the character and she gave it the name; I think you’d better call her and ask permission. Because if she doesn’t like it, I’m not gonna give you permission.” So [the writer] calls me, tells me, and I said, “What name did you have in mind?” He said, “Nyota.” I said, “That’s beautiful, what does it mean?” He said, “Star.” And I thought, a star of freedom, free-floating star, and I said, “Perfect.”

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“Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing.”

—Nick Mathewson

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“Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes enjoyed themselves as true Shakespeareans always enjoy themselves, arguing between each act about the reading of the parts, and the way the lines were said. Fortunately they found plenty to disapprove of, or they would not have enjoyed themselves at all.”

—Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild, p. 171

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“Speculative fiction is the only fiction that deals with modern reality in the only way that it can be comprehended—as the interface between a rapidly evolving and fissioning environment and the resultant continuously mutating human consciousness. Speculative fiction is surfacing into popular culture from every direction because it reflects the condition of the modern mind. It is the only fiction that confronts and explores the modern zeitgeist and is therefore inherently the literature of our times.”

—Norman Spinrad, from the intro to his anthology Modern Science Fiction, 1974

I quote this not to agree with it, but because I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed more recently; for example, it seems to me to be similar to what Sterling was talking about in his slipstream essay in 1989, as well as to things others have said in the years since then. I suppose that arguably this idea was implicit in the fiction of the New Wave; but even so, I don’t recall having previously seen it laid out this explicitly as early as 1974.

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Milo […] climbed into the wagon with Tock and the cabinet members. “How are you going to make it move? It doesn’t have a——”

“Be very quiet,” advised the duke, “for it goes without saying.”

And, sure enough, as soon as they were all quite still, it began to move quickly through the streets […]

—The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, ch. 6

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“[…] whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.”

—The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, ch. 18

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“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself. Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.”

—Octavia E. Butler

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Excerpt from Octavia E. Butler’s 2000 essay from Essence, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”:

“So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

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Well, there is one obvious conclusion that I have always held to,

Which is that if Nature had really intended human beings to get up, why they would get up naturally and wouldn’t have to be compelled to.

—Ogden Nash, from “Nature Knows Best”

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—Once on This Island

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“Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. […] Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. […] And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.”

—Oscar Wilde, from “The Decay of Lying” (1891)

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Molly is reading, and someone tries to talk to her:

“Molly made a vague noise of the kind intended to persuade people you have heard them when in fact you haven’t.”

—Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean

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“It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.”

—Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean

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“A crowd of small, yellow clothes-moths, with narrow wings edged with long fringes, have eaten all the vowels out of the above text, or fabric. This ‘editing by insects’ is in conformity with the principles of the nouvelle cuisine/criticism advocated by the French.”

—from Pamela Zoline’s 1981 story “Sheep”

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“What is it about homilies makes you want to retch? I mean, I’ll light their silly candle, but someone’s damn well going to hear about the dark.”

—Sir Tristan, in Firelord, by Parke Godwin

(As quoted by various places online; I don’t have a copy of the book to confirm the quote.)

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May the world have peace and plenty

To last a million years and twenty

May you have friends to last forever

For me, I’d like a grand piano.

—Patricia Shih, “Three Wishes”

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“[…] It started when the wicked fairy came to my christening.”

“She put a curse on you?”

“No. She ate cake and ice cream until she nearly burst and danced with my Uncle Arthur until two in the morning and had a wonderful time. So she went home without cursing me, and Aunt Ermintrude says that that’s where the whole problem started.”

—Dealing with Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, p. 68

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“[…] thou and he shall die by my hand. Thou hast but to choose the manner of thy death.”

“Old age,” Cimorene said promptly.

—Dealing with Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, p. 118

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I like this description of Therese drinking some hot milk that Carol has given her:

The milk was so hot, she could barely let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and released a mélange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo. It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup, and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill.

—Carol/The Price of Salt (1952), by Patricia Highsmith, p. 67

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‘Perhaps the best one-liner in a student paper this semester, “The analysis is severely limited by my lack of understanding of what I am doing” #humility’

—@shaferpr (Paul Shafer), May 7, 2021

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“Every time we give people another mechanism to communicate, they latch onto it. And then we see human nature happen again.”

—Pavel Curtis, creator of LambdaMOO, as quoted in Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre (second edition, 2014)

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“What kind of people do you imagine it must have been who felt so powerful a need to place the verb at the end of the sentence?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Imagine yourself in the House of Commons. You are listening to that eloquent ass, Sir Mark Cicero. He is just getting into his stride about the unspeakable behaviour of Mr Catiline. This villain, he tells you, nineteen virtuous matrons, more about their virtue all in the accusative so you know he’s done something to them but what, for heaven’s sake? Robbed them? Raped them? Taken them sailing? But, aha, here’s an adverb, whatever he’s done he’s done vilely, it looks as though we’re getting somewhere, but oh, no, here’s a quia and we’re plunging into the villain’s motives when we still don’t know whether the matrons are dead or alive…”

—Peter Dickinson, Hindsight, p. 46

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“I have no pets. Only bete noirs.”

—Peter Milligan

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Pete Seeger on lullabies:

“The most successful singing I have ever done in all my life has been when my audience went sound asleep on me. A lullaby is a work song, you know, quite unsuited for the stage. It should drone on and on, performing its ancient hypnosis, while the words, as usual, are mainly for the singer to ponder.”

—Pete Seeger, The Bells of Rhymney and Other Songs and Stories from the Singing of Pete Seeger, p. 11

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“High art was for those who saw death rather than lived death. For the dying creature a cup of water was more important.”

—The Divine Invasion, pp. 78–79 of my edition, by Philip K. Dick

…But then again:

“Give us bread, but give us roses.”

—“Bread and Roses,” James Oppenheim (inspired by Helen Todd et al)

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How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?

…how does one do that in a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and independence to arise in new ways under new conditions? That is, will new tyrannies abolish these protests? Or will there be new responses by the spirit that we can’t anticipate?

—Philip K. Dick, apparently in a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone

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“The capitalist,” they say, “has paid the laborers their daily wages.” To be accurate, it must be said that the capitalist has paid as many times one day’s wage as he has employed laborers each day,—which is not at all the same thing. For he has paid nothing for that immense power which results from the union and harmony of laborers, and the convergence and simultaneousness of their efforts. Two hundred grenadiers stood the obelisk of Luxor upon its base in a few hours; do you suppose that one man could have accomplished the same task in two hundred days? Nevertheless, on the books of the capitalist, the amount of wages paid would have been the same. Well, a desert to prepare for cultivation, a house to build, a factory to run,—all these are obelisks to erect, mountains to move. The smallest fortune, the most insignificant establishment, the setting in motion of the lowest industry, demand the concurrence of so many different kinds of labor and skill, that one man could not possibly execute the whole of them.

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?, ch. 3, section 5, 1840

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From the original Pink Panther movie, an exchange about Sir Charles’s affairs:

Woman: We call him the juggler. I’ve never really known a man like him. He can keep ten girls in the air at once and make each one happy.

Princess: Amazing. Sort of a contemporary Don Juan.

Other woman: That’s it.

Man: Ah, but there’s a difference. Sir Charles’s predecessor was forced to climb balconies and fight duels and, as I understand it, to keep his women separate and apart. Charles, on the other hand, drives a Ferrari, enters with a key, and resorts to collective bargaining.

And a bit from near the end of the movie:

Mrs. Clouseau: We can’t just let him rot in prison.

Sir Charles: Oh, it takes years for people to rot.

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“…Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded…”

—Plato, Phaedrus

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More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.

I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.

I need it for my dreams.

—Racter, The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed

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From Rainbow Rowell’s British-magic-school novel Carry On, two quotes.

First:

[The protagonist, Simon, is an inept-at-magic Chosen One. Penny is his best friend, who Simon met during his first year at magic school. She’s partly of Indian descent, and has red hair, and is very good at magic; presumably the author intended her to make readers think of Hermione, though Penny is from a family of magicians.]

[Penny] told me later that her parents had told her to steer clear of me at school. “My mum said that nobody really knew where you came from. And that you might be dangerous.”

“Why didn’t you listen to her?” I asked.

“Because nobody knew where you came from, Simon! And you might be dangerous!”

“You have the worst survival instincts.”

“Also, I felt sorry for you,” she said. “You were holding your wand backwards.”

Second:

[Simon arrives at the gate to the school, and he touches the bars to let the gate know that he’s there and that he’s a magician.]

That used to be all it took. The gates would swing open for anyone who was a magician. There’s even an inscription about it on the crossbar—MAGIC SEPARATES US FROM THE WORLD; LET NOTHING SEPARATE US FROM EACH OTHER.

“It’s a nice thought,” the Mage [Headmaster/Dumbledore figure] said when he appealed to the Coven for stiffer defences, “but let’s not take security orders from a six-hundred-year-old gate. I don’t expect people who come to my house to obey whatever’s cross-stitched on the throw pillows.”

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…Helen was still telling how she had sewed her severed arms back on, first the right and then the left, with a sail needle…

“How could you have sewed the right arm on first if you didn’t have your left arm on to sew with?“ Dorothy asked.

“I just said that to see if you were paying attention,” Helen said. “I really sewed my left arm on first and then my right.”

—R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth, pp 61–62

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“After it had cooled a little, the lawyer and Fronsac drank the tea with persimmon squeezings. The taste startled them. It was a new thing. Indeed, those persons who commonly take tea with persimmon—and there are fewer than two of them in the world—uniformly agree that there is no drink like it.”

—R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth, p. 127

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“…he was very easy to be afraid of. He had arms like a python. And if one cannot conceive of a python with arms, …”

—R. A. Lafferty, “Golden Gate,” 1982

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“Hektor looked as if he had been carved heroically out of ruddy-tan marble, and he also talked as if he were, which is to say that he didn’t talk very much.”

—R. A. Lafferty, Annals of Klepsis

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“Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”

—Ralph Ellison, from his 1981 introduction to his novel Invisible Man

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“…the path to being happy involves both striving for my ideals and accepting who I really am. That’s a fundamental contradiction, so it really helps to be irrational.”

—Ray Dillinger

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"Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness."

—Raymond Chandler, from chapter 23 of The Big Sleep

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From the preface to A Grammar of the Film, by Raymond Spottiswoode.

The book was written and published around 1935, but this edition was published in 1950, with a rather self-deprecating preface by the author, who refers to his younger self in the third person.

“…television offers a flat and melancholy reminder in many an American home that personality cannot be projected through the ether by a mere representation of the actor’s face and gestures.” (p. 4) [I suppose it can be projected better through the air of a movie theatre?]

“It seems unhappily true that Hollywood films will prove to be the dinosaur of the arts, immense in physical scale, feeble in wits, ponderously unchangeable when new conditions like the advent of television arise.” (p. 5)

“…the author is exceedingly wary about the advantages of color (except in animated films) because he fears that it will prove yet another step on the road backward to a mere imitation of life.” (p. 6)

“It is when he arrives at the subject of sound that our author’s hair-splitting logic becomes most perplexing. […] It may be useful, therefore, to try to disentangle what the author has to say from the brambles of logic on which it is caught.” (p. 7)

“Gazing out of his study from between his piles of books onto Oxford’s tree-shaded walks and quiet serenity, the world seems a disorderly place, needing the preachments of a professor to set it to rights. Later he may have learned that life does not fit itself into neat compartments, that at all times it is subject to violent whims and changes, and that the arts themselves are the least predictable of human creations.” (pp. 12–13)

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A few quotes from a 2017 article by Rebecca Solnit about hope and about the far-reaching effects that small positive actions can have.

“I use the term hope because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both. Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing.”

“Newcomers often think that results are either immediate or they’re nonexistent. That if you don’t succeed straight away, you failed. Such a framework makes many give up and go back home when the momentum is building and victories are within reach.”

“You do what you can. What you’ve done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it; will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to build a cradle or a house? You don’t know. A tree can live much longer than you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that new idea about what is true, right, just remake the world.”

(Fwiw, I don’t read this essay as a gradualist argument that you shouldn’t bother to try to do anything big or soon, but some friends of mine do.)

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“Remember, it is your life to understand and define. Figuring out who we are can be a bit like peeling an onion—as we remove layers, we get ever closer to the heart. Give your life permission to emerge in its own time, without self-condemnation.”

—Reid Vanderburgh, in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, p. 107

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From SFMOMA’s Magritte exhibit:

“Acknowledging that some of the Surrealist movement’s absurd objectives, such as causing panic or confusion, had been ‘achieved much better by the Nazi idiots than by us,’ Magritte invented a completely new mode of Surrealism that skirted censorship while also testing his theory that ‘bad painting’ might result in social good. ‘I live in a very unpleasant world,’ he commented in 1947. ‘That’s why my painting is a battle, or rather a counteroffensive.’”

(This description is specifically about his “sunlit surrealist” (1943–1947) and “vache” (1948) periods, not about his later and more-famous-nowadays work.)

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Three quotes about dancing.

“If there be but one vicious mind in the set, ’twill spread like contagion—the action of their pulse beats to the lascivious movement of the jig—their quivering, warm-breathed sighs impregnate the very air—the atmosphere becomes electrical to love, and each amorous spark darts through every link of the chain…"

—Faulkland, on country dances, from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals

“Dear me, dancing is peculiar when you really think about it. If a man held your hand and put his arm round your waist without its being dancing, it would be most important; in dancing, you don‘t even notice it—well, only a little bit.”

—from I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, p. 127

“We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced (we believe for the first time) at the English court on Friday last … it is quite sufficient to cast one‘s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressure on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”

—The Times of London, 16th July 1816

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“[Swarthmore engages in] constant self-examination, intense, sometimes perhaps even obsessive. […] If Swarthmore were a plant, its survival would have been jeopardized, for the Board of Managers (or the president or the faculty or the alumni or the students, often several, or all, at once) was forever pulling it up by the roots to see how well it was growing.”

—from the Foreword to Swarthmore College: An Informal History (1986), by Richard J. Walton

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The snow came down last night like moths

Burned on the moon…

—Richard Wilbur, “First Snow in Alsace,” 1947

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“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”

—Rick Polito’s fake TV listing for The Wizard of Oz, from his column in the Marin Independent Journal, 1998 or so (for more about this, see a 2012 article about Polito)

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One character is explaining to another character about how the automatic fiction-writing machine he’s invented works:

“[…] there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the [writer] is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

—Roald Dahl, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”

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“The stories that last have characters that are as real as your uncle. It’s this whatever it is that separates the sheep from the goats in fantasy.”

—Robert A. Hedeen

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“It is not practical to shake hands with a dragon, kiss it, nor hug it.”

—Between Planets, Robert A. Heinlein, p. 142

(He’s talking about Venusian dragons, not fantasy dragons, but even so, I was amused.)

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Robert A. Heinlein on Sturgeon:

Ted was not even mildly homosexual. You can check this for yourself if you wish. I have no need to; I knew him intimately for more than forty years.)

[…] My first impression of Sturgeon was that no male had any business being that pretty. He was a golden boy, one that caused comparisons with Michelangelo's David. Or Baldur.

—from Heinlein‘s introduction to Sturgeon's final novel, Godbody

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If the McKennas are right in their basic theory, every psychedelic trip is literally a voyage through the quantum information system at faster-than-light velocity, i.e., outside ‘time’ in the local (Einsteinian) universe.

This sounds much like a more scientific formulation of the incoherent ideas about time that many UFO Contactees have tried to communicate.

—Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, p. 217

(#IDoNotThinkTheWordScientificMeansWhatYouThinkItMeans)

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“I refer here to my state of ignorance in the mid 1970s, before I advanced to the more complex state of ignorance I now possess.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II (1991), p. 57

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“The world would make some kind of sense if there was one group of ‘insiders’ who really run everything. Since the world obviously doesn’t make any sense, there is no such group.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 146

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10. Domesticated primates, like wild primates, want chiefly an alpha male to lead them. The more closely this figure approximates the primordial archetype—i.e., the meanest-tempered baboon in the herd—the more fervently the other primates will follow him. […]

11. After finding an alpha male to lead them, domesticated primates then seek a scapegoat on whom to blame their troubles. […]

12. The chief function of the alpha male in a domesticated primate pack is to find, denounce, and lead the persecution of such scapegoats, internal and external.

—Robert Anton Wilson, writing as his fictional character Simon Moon, in an essay in The Illuminati Papers, circa 1980

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“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers, p. 111

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Crowley has just finished giving a talk:

“You may now,” Crowley said carelessly, “unburden yourselves of the thoughts with which you passed the time while pretending to listen attentively to me, but in accord with English decorum and the rituals of the public lecture, you must phrase these remarks in the form of questions.”

—Masks of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 223

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“Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.”

—Robert Benchley

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“You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.”

—Robert Cormier, “A Bad Time for Fathers”

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“[A]t least 3% of the signers of the Constitution must have been gay, since that’s the low estimate for any population sample. It was probably higher, given that they were a pretty talented bunch and wore wigs.”

—Robert Scheer

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“[…] unfortunately I still write in that irrational style which suggests covert frivolity, and for which I am undergoing a course of treatment in English literature at Columbia College.”

—from “In Quest of the Dingue” (1904), by Robert W. Chambers

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—The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

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In The Non-Designer’s Design Book, by Robin Williams (the other Robin Williams), one of the example page layouts is a page about the Elizabethan humors.

Part of the example text of that page says this:

Eyes have Power

When two people fall in love, their hearts physically became one. Invisible vapors emanate from one’s eyes and penetrate the other’s. These vapors change the other’s internal organs so both people’s inner parts become similar to each other, which is why they fall in love—their two hearts merge into one. You must be careful of eyes.

(Fourth edition, p. 57)

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—from Prince of Cats, a comic-book hip-hop reworking of Romeo & Juliet, by Ronald Wimberly

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Years ago, back in the Usenet days, someone used to have as their .signature a verse that I quite liked; but it was unattributed, and my occasional desultory attempts to determine its provenance over the years met with failure.

Eventuallly turned out it’s the first stanza of a Kipling poem called “The Dawn Wind,” written for a book by C. R. L. Fletcher called A School History of England.

I’m not as fond of the rest of the poem, but here’s that first stanza:

At two o’clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,

You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.

And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,

And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

I also like the first few lines of another of the poems from that book, “With Drake in the Tropics”:

South and far south below the Line,

Our Admiral leads us on,

Above, undreamed-of planets shine—

The stars we know are gone.

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“You are making my spots ache … and besides, I didn’t want your advice at all.”

—Painted Jaguar, in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories

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“Nonbinary awareness week was created by hallmark to sell more genders!!!!”

—@sallyt on Twitter (tweet no longer exists)

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“The jinn grants wishes. Three per user.”

“Why three?” Bador asks.

“It was judged to be an appropriate free trial period,” the jinn says. “More wishes can be unlocked in Unlimited Mode.”

—from The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu

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“Some poets always begin to get groggy about the knees after running for seven or eight lines.”

—The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler, p. 17 of the Signet paperback edition

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“…to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride…”

—from the preface to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary

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In the preface to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, he wrote (among other things) about hoping that readers would excuse lapses and faults in the book. He noted that some readers would mock or be critical, but he hoped that some others

“will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness […]; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize vigilance, slight [distractions] will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need, for that which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.”

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🎵 Sing a song of glory, and you will be the glory.

Nought are ye but song, and as ye sing ye are.

—The Sufi Choir, “Crescent and Heart,” referencing the poem “Crescent and Heart” by Murshid Samuel L. Lewis

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In The Einstein Intersection, published in 1967 (when Samuel R. Delany was 25 or so), I’m particularly intrigued by the excerpts from the author’s journal (nonfiction, I assume, though I could be wrong) used as occasional chapter epigraphs; I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else use that particular technique.

One such excerpt (at the beginning of the penultimate chapter), includes a couple of lines I especially liked:

“I can start the meticulous process of overlaying another filigree across the novel’s palimpsest.”

And:

“Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.”

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“I couldn’t talk about life at the Heavenly Breakfast without talking about drugs and sex. Yet I couldn’t mention either without their falling into value matrices set up by other people which precluded what I really wanted to discuss: the texture and affectivity of life lived humanely, day by day.”

—Samuel R. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, pp. 90–91

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“[…] most SF is governed by a political-ethical system which one hesitates to call fascist only because any functioning fascist group would have to be a great deal more in touch with the complexities of the world even to exist, much less to oppress others.”

—Samuel R. Delany, “The Order of ‘Chaos’” (a review of Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died), Science Fiction Studies, Nov. 1979

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“when I think of what those songs, that laughter must mean to those who are excluded from it, I want to flee this city, this country, this land ready to think of anything but the pain within it.”

—from Flight from Nevèrÿon, by Samuel R. Delany

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In Delany’s world of Nevèrÿon, dragons can glide if they jump from a ledge, but they can’t take off from the ground. In the opening chapter of Neveryóna, fifteen-year-old Pryn has just flown on dragonback, but the dragon landed in a clearing instead of on a ledge, so it won’t be able to take off again from here. The tale-teller Norema tells Pryn:

“Untie your dragon and let her wander into the mountains where she belongs. Left to herself, she’ll find the ledges she needs, as you must too—but you can’t be tied down with dragons that won’t fly where you want to go, no matter how much fun the notion of flight.”

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“Trips to stockholders’ meetings will bring drama and adventure into otherwise colorless and sedentary suburban lives.”

—Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

(I found much of the book offputting, but I was amused by this line.)

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“[T]here are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh, and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to enjoy them both equally.”

—The Pillow Book, by Sei Shōnagon, section 172(?)

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“Remember the first rule of chess: Never show your pieces.”

—Amon Harthrow, Dresden Codak, by Senna Diaz, ”Dark Science #67 – Shock and Awe”

(…Content warning for planning police violence.)

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The chorus from Shaggy’s song “Hope” (YouTube):

🎵 She said, “Son there’ll be times when the tides are high

And the boat may be rocky; you can cry,

Just never give up.

You can never give up.”

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“They still began their services with the first words the prophetess had spoken to them as a teaching. ‘This I say unto you, be not sexist pigs.’”

—Sheri S. Tepper, Raising the Stones, p. 156

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“she moved as a whip cracks, always seeming to arrive wherever she was going with considerable noise but without having bothered to travel the intervening distance.”

—Sheri S. Tepper, Grass, p. 60

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“The house in itself was, even before anything had happened there, as lovely a thing as she had ever seen.”

—Shirley Jackson, demonstrating how to do creepy foreshadowing in the opening sentence of her 1950 short story “The Lovely House.” (The story may have later been retitled “The Visit.”)

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“one difference between cats and dogs is that dogs do absolutely nothing to mask their clinginess while cats pretend it’s a coincidence they’re in the same room as you 97% of the time”

—@shirleyjacksons

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There’s a Si Kahn song that I almost love: “When the Shore Is Out of Sight” (YouTube). But there’s a line in the chorus that never quite sat right with me. So I slightly altered the lyrics to something I liked better. I’m not entirely satisfied with it—I lost some parallelism—but I think I like it better, for now, than the original.

🎵 From this love, the space to grow in;

From this peace, the path to light;

From these friends, the strength to journey

When the shore is out of sight.

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A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

—from Stephen Crane’s 1899 “War Is Kind and Other Lines”

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“🎵 And who cares if he’s all dammed—I beg your pardon—up inside…”

—Henrik, A Little Night Music, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

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“Sex is natural, sex is good

Not everybody does it, but everybody…

…talks about it.”

—someone named Suma, riffing on “I Want Your Sex” by George Michael (I saw this written on a chalkboard in high school)

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From the printed book of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (specifically end-note 16, p. 38):

Some may wonder—was there anything romantic between [Lovelace and Babbage]? There’s a good reason to think that there was, and that reason is, it’s extremely fun to think about. Sadly that’s the only reason, as there isn’t a hint of romance in any of their correspondence with each other, and they weren’t exactly the subtlest people in the world.

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T

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“But being a dissenter from orthodoxy is not difficult; the hard part is actually having a better theory. Publishing dissenting theories is important when they are backed by plausible evidence, but this does not mean giving critics ‘equal time’ to dissent from every finding by a mainstream scientist.”

—Ted Goertzel, “Conspiracy theories in science” (EMBO Reports 2010)

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“It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences[,] that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt. […] The text is, as it were, ideologically forbidden to say certain things; in trying to tell the truth in [their] own way, for example, the author finds [themself] forced to reveal the limits of the ideology within which [they write]. [They are] forced to reveal its gaps and silences, what it is unable to articulate.”

—Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) (summarizing the arguments of Pierre Macherey), as quoted in Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 94

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“That was proper nostalgia, not like the nostalgia you get today.”

—Terry Pratchett, in his autobiography notes, as quoted by Rob Wilkins in Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes

(A web search reveals several variations on that phrase; I imagine that Pratchett wasn’t the only one who came up with that joke.)

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I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

—Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”

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“Overhead he heard the tiny, unlubricated sound of a bat.”

—Theodore Sturgeon, “Excalibur and the Atom,” 1951

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Theodore Sturgeon’s 1951 story “Rule of Three” (spoilers!) features two tripartite energy beings who embed themselves in six humans, and then try to reintegrate themselves by getting the humans to bond in two groups of three, but when that fails, they switch to three groups of two and all is fine. There’s a bit of interesting gay subtext and hints at the possibility of three humans finding happiness together, but the people end up as three male/female pairs.

In 1979, Sturgeon wrote an introduction to a reprint of the story, in which he said:

Although the person who wrote “Rule of Three” clearly regarded the desirability of monogamy as axiomatic, the astute reader—another term for postgame quarterbacking—might find in it the seeds of later ideation. One tends to work out one’s own convictions in writing fiction—especially in science fiction—and to test them against possibilities, however untimely or unformed or wishful or improbable. Anyway, in this story (1951) one may find what is possibly the first suggestion in science fiction that love may not after all be confined to gender or to monogamy. Here are the seeds of later work like More Than Human, and the growing concept that perhaps, after all, the greatest advance we can make is to accept what we are, and then to grok, to blesh, to meld, to join. Real science fiction talk, that, ain’t it?

(As quoted in Baby Is Three: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. VI, in the story notes on p. 406.)

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“You must always begin with craft, but you must always move to art. Else why bother?”

—Theodore Sturgeon, as quoted by William Tenn in his intro to Bright Segment (vol VIII of the complete-Sturgeon-stories series)

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Sturgeon on agents and editors:

“An editor is a writer who can‘t write, and an agent is a writer who can‘t write as well as an editor.”

—Naome (an agent‘s assistant), in Sturgeon‘s “The Traveling Crag” (1951). Not true, but funny.

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In a 1977 interview, Theodore Sturgeon recounted something that happened during the time of the McCarthy hearings. Sturgeon owed Horace Gold (editor of Galaxy) a 20K-word story, and Gold called him up to ask where it was, and Sturgeon got very distressed about what was going on in politics.

…The whole country was in a strange type of fear, some great intangible something that nobody could get hold of. A very frightening thing.

I [had become] aware by that time that I had a fairly high-caliber typewriter, and I became alarmed by the fact that I wasn’t using it for anything but what I call “literature of entertainment.” I don’t want to knock entertainment at all, but I felt I had the tool to do something but I didn’t know what to do with it.

Horace listened to me with great care, and he said, “I’ll tell you what you do, Sturgeon. you write me a story about a guy whose wife has gone away for the weekend, and he goes down to the bus station to meet her, and the bus arrives and the whole place is full of people. He looks across the crowd and he sees his wife emerge from the exit talking to a young man who is talking earnestly back to her. And he is carrying her suitcase. She looks across the crowd, sees her husband, speaks a word to the young man and the young man hands her her suitcase, tips his hat, and disappears into the crowd, and she comes across to [her husband] and kisses him. Now then, Sturgeon, write me that story, and by the time you’re finished the whole world will know how you feel about Joseph McCarthy.”

—quoted in vol. 7, of the complete-Sturgeon-stories series, A Saucer of Loneliness, pp. 384-385 of the trade paperback edition

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—The Thin Man

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“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.”

—Thomas de Quincey, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

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“You may as well dine first, and be miserable afterwards.”

—Raven, the butler, in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), ch. 14

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“And then, as the French book saith, the queen and Launcelot were together. And whether they were abed or at other manner of disports, me list not hereof make no mention, for love that time was not as is now-a-days.”

—Le Morte d’Arthur, by Thomas Malory

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From Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, Act II (published in 1938):

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Tom Hardy, on playing Max in Mad Max: Fury Road:

“You don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t, so you have to be brave. If you’re not failing, you’re not fucking doing the job properly.”

—as quoted in Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, p. 147

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“[…] a day is coming when our novels will be written by computers, the same devices that will paint our murals and compose our tunes.”

—Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), pp. 36-37

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The first-person narrator of Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz is kind of mysterious; as Morrison says in a 2001 interview, “the narrator is unreliable and […] learns along with the reader what the truth is about the characters. The narrator has been half-describing, half-witnessing, and half-inventing.”

So I was particularly tickled by this line from the narrator, about ⅔ of the way through the book:

“[…] it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.”

—p. 160

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“Mary Ellman‘s Thinking About Women (1968) [describes] the eleven major stereotypes of femininity as presented by male writers and critics: formlessness, passivity, instability, confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality, compliancy, and finally ‘the two incorrigible figures’ of the Witch and the Shrew.”

—Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 34

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“[…] all forms of radical thought inevitably remain mortgaged to the very historical categories they seek to transcend. But our understanding of this historically necessary paradox should not lead us complacently to perpetuate patriarchal practices.”

—Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 88

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“If you don’t like my play, then by all means write a better one yourselves,” he remarked.

“Dearest one,” said Moominmamma. “We think it’s wonderful. Don’t we?”

“Of course,” everybody said.

“You hear,” said Moominmamma. “Everybody likes it. If you just change the style and the plot a little.”

—Moominsummer Madness, by Tove Jansson

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From Comet in Moominland, a conversation between Moomintroll and Sniff:

“You always want adventures, Sniff, and when they come you’re so frightened you don’t know what to do.”

“Well, I’m not a lion,” said Sniff reproachfully. “I like small adventures. Just the right size.”

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Too-ticky on adventures and heroes:

“Quite, quite,” she thought with a little sigh. “It’s always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.”

—Moominland Midwinter, p. 122, by Tove Jansson

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“There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom.”

—from The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson

(The protagonists are pretending to live in Venice.)

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For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942)

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—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” (1940)

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U

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In Underground s2e1, “Contraband,” there’s a scene in which one of the main white characters, Elizabeth, meets a group of abolitionist women (of various races). And the following discussion ensues:

Excellent metacommentary. I half expected one of them to say “Maybe we should try making a TV show.”

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“I don’t know how to act my age—I’ve never been this old before.”

—seen on a shirt in an ad, original source unknown

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Cute bit from Overheard in New York:

The United Nations, Encapsulated

Dude #1: They have been underestimating my power.

Dude #2: What?

Dude #1: They have been underestimating my power for quite some time now.

Dude #2: What are you, a supervillain? Who’s been underestimating your power? The justice league?

Dude #1: No, the electric company. They say I owe them eight hundred dollars.

Dude #2: Dude, you and I were having two totally different conversations.

—at Penn Station, overheard by: 13Atlantic

via Overheard in New York, Jan 14, 2008

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Encountered this on rathergood.com; no idea whether it’s by them or by someone else unknown:

And the princess lived happily ever after until she got executed in a basement by the glorious leaders of the revolution THE END

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One of the things that some of the rhyme-chains in Hamilton reminded me of:

”Now he was a giant, so huge and defiant, but if he was tryin’ to stop you denyin’ that he’s self-reliant, you’d soon be compliant, and no use in cryin’ that you were a scientist merely supplyin’ some data, not spyin’; his eyes would be eyein’ ya, soon he’d be fryin’ ya! Out of the fryin’ pan, hung out for dryin’, man! Then he’s supplyin’ the hurt! You’d be dyin’, man! He’d break your neck just like snappin’ a twig! I’m tellin’ you, brother, this mother was big.”

—a spoken bit in the song “David and Goliath,” as performed by the Cats & Jammers. (Author unknown to me.)

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“…he has a car named Kafka.”

“Oh—a Volkswagen bug, right?”

—Unknown (which is to say, I forget who said this)

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“Do not […] dangle the mouse by its cable or throw the mouse at co-workers.”

—from the IRIS Indigo Owner’s Guide, author unknown

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“Juggling is catching!”

—unknown (I heard someone say this as I walked past them while I was juggling; I don’t know if it was original to them, or if they were quoting someone)

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“Monogamy leaves a lot to be desired.”

—unknown

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“Please do not call back, as this may delay our service to you.”

—Vision Service Plan automated telephone info system, author unknown

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“This is a non-smoking flight. If you do it again we’ll have to ask you to step outside.”

—captain of airplane (name unknown to me), over PA system, while we were in the air

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“When’s he gonna stop treating me like a second-grade citizen?”

—someone unknown to me on a phone at JFK airport

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“Nothing says ‘feminism’ like demanding that women remove their clothing until you are happy about the way they look.”

—unknown, quoted by David Moles

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Advice from a 14th-century French man to his wife, about things to teach servants:

“And arrange first that each have beside his bed a candlestick in which to put his candle and have them wisely taught to extinguish it with the mouth or the hand before getting into bed and not by throwing shirts at it.”

—from the book known as Le Menagier de Paris, author unknown; presumably translated by Eileen Power. (As quoted in Power’s Medieval Women, p. 52)

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The King immediately commanded the officers of his wardrobe to run and fetch one of his best suits for the Lord Marquis of Carabas.

The King caressed him after a very extraordinary manner, and as the fine clothes he had given him extremely set off his good mien (for he was well made and very handsome in his person) […]

—from the version of “Puss in Boots” in Best-loved Folktales of the World, author unknown, ed. Joanna Cole, 1982

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“One reporter, after hearing a Brown steam-powered [fog] siren for the first time, described it as having ‘a screech like an army of panthers, weird and prolonged, gradually lowering in note until after half a minute it becomes the roar of a thousand mad bulls, with intermediate voices suggestive of the wail of a lost soul, the moan of a bottomless pit and the groan of a disabled elevator.’”

—from the Wikipedia article about foghorns, author unknown

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“We have only struck a little piece of ice and passed it.”

—a deck steward (name unknown to me) on the Titanic, according to A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord

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—Unknown (riffing on Browning)

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“We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

—from “Nine Lives,” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

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“There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”

—Sparrowhawk, in Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (1972), p. 121 of the 1980 Bantam paperback edition

Out of context, that may sound kind of grim, but in context it’s hopeful and kind of inspiring. (It’s also, of course, related to the epigraph at the beginning of the trilogy, the one that starts out “Only in silence the word.”)

And it reminded me of the chorus of an anti-war song by Libby Roderick:

🎵 I’d rather be dancing, at the edge of my grave.

I’d rather be holding you close as we march forward loving and brave.

I’d rather be singing, in the face of my fear.

I’d rather be dancing in front of the guns as long as I’m here.

—Libby Roderick, “Dancing in Front of the Guns,” 1991 (full lyrics)

As usual, the lyrics alone don’t really give a sense of the song, but thanks to the iTunes Store, you can listen to a 30-second sample of “Dancing in Front of the Guns” and the other songs on that album.

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The opening of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974):

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. […]

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. […] The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it[…]

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From Le Guin’s “Introduction to Planet of Exile” (intro written in 1977 or 1978; can now be found in The Language of the Night). Worth reading the whole piece, but here’s a bit of it:

Planet of Exile was written in 1963–1964[…]. The book exhibits my early, “natural” (i.e., happily acculturated), unawakened, un-consciousness-raised way of handling male and female characters. At that time, I could say with a perfectly clear conscience, indeed with self-congratulation, that I simply didn’t care whether my characters were male or female, so long as they were human.

[…] it’s ever so much easier to write about men doing things, because most books about people doing things are about men[…].

[…] All too often we have found that we had no opinion or belief of our own, but had simply incorporated the dogmas of our society; and so we must discover, invent, make our own truths, our values, ourselves.

[…] I use the tools of feminism, and try to figure out what makes me work and how I work, so that I will no longer work in ignorance or irresponsibly.

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“I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B—or, more often, from A to A—by the most difficult and circuitous route.”

—Le Guin, in her intro to City of Illusions (intro written in 1977 or 1978)

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“No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Hunger,” 1981 (or maybe 1989?)

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(Content warning for description of soldiers killing protesters, in a fictional Eastern European country.)

“This is history. Once upon a time in 1830, in 1848, in 1866, in 1918, in 1947, in 1956, stones flew. Stones flew through the air like pigeons, and hearts, too, hearts had wings. Those were the years when the stones flew, the hearts took wing, the young voices sang. The soldiers raised their muskets to the ready, the soldiers aimed their rifles, the soldiers poised their machine guns. They were young, the soldiers. They fired. The stones lay down, the pigeons fell. There’s a kind of red stone called pigeon’s blood, a ruby. The red stones of Roukh Square were never rubies; slosh a bucket of water over them or let the rain fall and they’re grey again, lead grey, common stones. Only now and then in certain years they have flown, and turned to rubies.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Unlocking the Air,” 1990

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“At the day’s end there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn and back to work, and so round and so round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water falling.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu (1990)

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“I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from her story “Solitude” (1994)

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“You can’t change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.”

—said by a character in “A Man of the People” (1995), by Ursula K. Le Guin, in Four Ways to Forgiveness

I’m not sure I agree with this as stated; I think there’s some nuance missing there. But I also find the idea pretty compelling, especially because I tend to be more inclined to stand apart and look at the pattern than to get involved in the weaving.

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“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.”

—from Steering the Craft (1998?), by Ursula K. Le Guin

(Several people have responded to this by disagreeing with Le Guin about what the word conflict means in the context of teaching fiction writing. But I feel like her underlying point is still useful.)

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“To create difference—to establish strangeness—then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from her Foreword to The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002)

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“Adolescents struggle fiercely and consciously to understand their world, make sense of it, cope with it, make moral choices. Their struggle is often genuinely desperate. They need help. Story is perhaps the most flexible tool at the disposal of mind. With it we remake reality. We retell events, we imagine alternatives, we figure out how to live according to our desires and according to our needs.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Why Kids Want Fantasy” (2004?), published in Cheek by Jowl

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“There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn’t a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from her 2008 (?) afterword to Tehanu

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“Storytellers’ stories, like scientific theories, are explorations, excursions into the tremendous gap between almost knowing and knowing. Bridges thrown out, as a spider throws herself on her first long anchoring thread, not certain where it will land her yet trusting it to do so.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from her 2012 (?) afterword in Tales from Earthsea

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“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Freedom” (“A speech in acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, November 2014.”)

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From a brief Le Guin introduction (written in 2016) to The Word for World Is Forest (written in 1977):

“a high-budget, highly successful film resembled the novel in so many ways that people have often assumed I had some part in making it. Since the film completely reverses the book’s moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution, I’m glad I had nothing at all to do with it.”

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“This is why FTL is so popular: you really can’t have a Galactic War without it.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from her intro to the 2017 Library of America book Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two, p. xiv

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“My knowledge of anthropology is slight, but it is a familiar acquaintance, and it gave me some insight into the inexhaustible strangeness of human social customs and the all but universal human refusal to see anything strange about them if they’re our own customs, and anything good about them if they’re not.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, from her intro to the Library of America book Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two, p. xv

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In the graphic novel Digger (about halfway through; p. 451 of the Omnibus edition, p. 491 of the webcomic), a mysterious, masked character named Trader Manuel shows up, and speaks in a dark, mysterious, portentous way about nameless cults and cartographers going mad and such. And then the following exchange ensues, between the trader and the eminently practical and sensible wombat protagonist, Digger:

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V

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From Vera Chapman’s 1977 story “Crusader Damosel.” I don’t recommend it, but I was surprised by one particular moment. A young woman from England, named Adela, has gone to the Crusades (with her parents, and not in disguise as a man or anything), and has mutually fallen in love with a Knight Templar, but they only interact in (essentially) their dreams. And during their first interaction that we see in the dream-world, this exchange happens:

“What do you call me—here?” she asked.

“Why—Adal, I think,” he answered.

“And am I a boy or a girl?”

“A boy, of course—no, a girl—oh, to be sure, I don’t know.” And he laughed in confusion. “But come on—the trumpets are sounding[…]”

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“I thought all the Singularity types had died or been carted off to old folks homes long ago. But […] I guess like Nostradamus, some notions will never go away.”

—from the 2010 short story “A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee.”

(The author of the story is Vernor Vinge.)

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From Vienna Teng’s song “The Atheist Christmas Carol” (YouTube):

🎵 It’s the season of bowing our heads in the wind

And knowing we are not alone in fear,

Not alone in the dark.

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“Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them.”

—from To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, one of the books that I eventually took down from my ever-growing bookshelf of unread books to read, after thirty years of not reading it

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“We act in stupid and short-sighted ways and then we behave as if we didn’t have any responsibility for those actions. Somehow that justifies our continuing to behave in the same short-sighted ways. Instead of trying to change, we hope it works better this time.”

—Victoria MacKenzie, in Vonda N. McIntyre’s Starfarers

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W

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In the Pogo comic strip dated 13 December 1951, Churchy and Albert are talking to Beau Moonlight Sonata, the famous singing frog:

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“If I could only write, I’d write a nasty letter to the Mayor, if he could only read.”

—from Pogo, by Walt Kelly

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“…how many talents you ’spect is wrop up in one boy? I only good at writin’ an’ never gives a hoot for readin’ what I writes.”

—Albert the Alligator, in Pogo, by Walt Kelly

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“To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little”

—from Walt Whitman, “To the States,” 1860

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“Being a bisexual is a lot like being a Tom Waits fan. You grow up thinking you’re the only one and not talking about it much. Then when he comes to town, you can’t even get a ticket.”

—Wayne, The Bi Monthly (BBMN), November 1987

(As quoted in Bisexuality: A Reader and Sourcebook, ed. Thomas Geller, 1990, p. 8 )

#CommitToTheMetaphor

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“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work[…]”

—W. E. B. Du Bois

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“I like the idea of a volume of ‘selected poems’ because I like the ideas of culling and condensation and compactness. In making this book, I have culled a lot of poems and thus have achieved some condensation as a matter of course. I might have achieved compactness as well, if I had had the foresight and the good luck to write shorter poems. Having so often failed at brevity, and needing to represent my work at least adequately, I have had to sacrifice compactness in the interest of fairness to myself.”

—from the author’s note at the start of The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry

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Here’s a piece from Wendell Berry’s 1998 poem “The Country of Marriage,” a bit which I feel like applies as well to unmarried life as to married:

Sometimes our life reminds me

of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing

and in that opening a house,

an orchard and garden,

comfortable shades, and flowers

red and yellow in the sun, a pattern

made in the light for the light to return to.

The forest is mostly dark, its ways

to be made anew day after day, the dark

richer than the light and more blessed,

provided we stay brave

enough to keep on going in.

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“All scientific work is, of course, based consciously or subconsciously on some philosophical attitude.”

—Werner Heisenberg

(Quote is approximate; I’ve seen various versions of it. I’m also not certain of the context; it may not mean what I think it means. But I like what it sounds to me like it’s saying.)

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of whom shall we speak? For every day they die

among us, those who were doing us some good,

who knew it was never enough but

hoped to improve a little by living.

—W. H. Auden, from “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”

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Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

—William Shakespeare, from Cymbeline

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William Tenn’s 1958 story “Eastward Ho!” (as reprinted in the 60th-anniversary volume The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction) takes place in a post-Collapse future in which American Indians (who are redeveloping science and technology) control most of the former US. I was rolling my eyes a bit at some Indian stereotypes transplanted into the future, but then I got to this bit:

Makes Much Radiation [the chief’s son] shifted his shoulders back and forth and flexed his arm muscles. “All this talk,” he growled. “Paleface talk. Makes me tired.”

[…]

One of the other, older warriors near the chief spoke up. “In the old days, in the days of the heroes, a boy of Makes Much Radiation’s age would not dare raise his voice in council before his father. Certainly not to say the things he just has. I cite as reference, for those interested, Robert Lowie’s definitive volume, The Crow Indians, and Lesser’s fine piece of anthropological insight, Three Types of Siouan Kinship. Now, whereas we have not yet been able to reconstruct a Siouan kinship pattern on the classic model described by Lesser, we have developed a working arrangement that—”

“The trouble with you, Bright Book Jacket,” the warrior on his left broke in, “is that you’re too much of a classicist.”

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From Maynard Moose’s story “Pegamoose and the Gorgonzola Medusa” (by Willy Claflin), the early part of the story describing the ancient mooses who lived on Mount Galumpus:

First and foremost: Mother Moose, creator of the universe. Then there were her faithful servants, the nine mooses. There was Clio, Mio, Calliope, Cacophony, Terpsichore, Androgyny, Hegemony, Chastity, and Gwendolyn.

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Pat (Spencer Tracy) and Jamie (Katharine Hepburn) are on a sleeper train, and the following dialogue ensues:

—from Without Love, Hepburn/Tracy, 1945

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🎵 Oh, philosophers may sing of the troubles of the king,

Yet the duties are delightful and the privileges great.

But the privilege and pleasure that we treasure beyond measure

Is to run on little errands for the Ministers of State.

—The Gondoliers, by Gilbert & Sullivan

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Remember the good old days when everyone liked to read long stories, before modern media shortened everyone’s attention spans? Maugham does:

“When the nineteenth century was young, men had fewer ways of amusing their leisure than they have now and were not displeased if their fiction moved at a deliberate pace; they accepted without reluctance a dilatory exposition and a sauntering digressiveness. […] Now everyone reads newspapers every day, one or more, and the reading public has grown to demand succinctness and a graphic way of putting things[…]”

—W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to anthology Tellers of Tales, 1939

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Y

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SLEEPING PIECE 1

Write all the things you want to do.

Ask others to do them and sleep

until they finish doing them.

Sleep as long as you can.

—Yoko Ono (1960), from her book Grapefruit

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“A cloud consists of the following substances: colour, music, smell, sleep and water. Sometimes it rains substances other than water, but very few people notice it.” (This is in a section of True/False questions.)

—Yoko Ono, from her book Grapefruit (no page number)

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“Dance Report—on floating (or how to make the city so light that it floats away in the sky): Carry a stone. Go on carrying heavier stones until they become so heavy that the whole city starts to look lighter than what you are carrying.”

—Yoko Ono, from her book Grapefruit (no page number)

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“I would like to see the sky machine on every corner of the street instead of the coke machine. We need more skies than coke.”

—Yoko Ono, from her book Grapefruit (no page number)

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Z

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From The Changeling, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Martha, the protagonist doesn’t really like games, but she’s agreed to play Monopoly with her brother Tom, and she turns out to be lucky at it:

“She could have absolutely wiped Tom out if she’d tried, but she didn’t much want to. Taking someone’s money and houses away seemed like an awful way to win. When Tom finally lit on her most expensive property she said, ‘Look, Tom. Let’s pretend that I was out of town and I just asked you to stay there and take care of the hotel, and you didn’t have to pay the rent.’”

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