Elizabeth Moon Quotes

Of death I am as certain as any mortal, Ammerlin, but defeat is certain only in despair.

Yet powerful as they were, as powerful as music that brings heart-piercing pain, tears, laughter, with its enchantments, they were as music, subordinate to their own creator. Humans need not, Paks saw, worship their immortality, their cool wisdom, their knowledge of the taig, their ability to repattern mortal perceptions. In brief mortal lives humans met challenges no elf could meet, learned strategies no elf could master, chose evil or good more direct and dangerous than elf could perceive. Humans were shaped for conflict, as elves for harmony; each needed the other's balance of wisdom, but must cleave to its own nature. It was easy for an immortal to counsel patience, withdrawal until a danger passed . . .

Normal' is a dryer setting.

This individual does not know where initiative ends and rocket-propelled idiocy begins.

If you cannot read it, how could you catalog it?

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

Metaphorically, Tom said, if you take knowledge as light, and ignorance as dark, there does sometimes seem to be a real presence to the dark
to ignorance. Something more tactile and muscley than just lack of knowledge. A sort of will to ignorance. It would explain some politicians.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.

You don't have to,' I say. 'You are normal. You have a job with tenure. You have Lucia and this house.' I cannot say the rest that I think, that he is easy in his body, that he sees and hears and tastes and feels what others do, so his reality matches theirs.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.

Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

When - notice that I do not say if, being granted almost as much stubbornness as you, by Gird's grace - when you find that you can swear your honor to Gird's fellowship, it will be my pleasure to give and receive your strokes. Is that satisfactory, or have you more conditions for a Marshal-General of Gird, and Captain-Temporal of the High Lord? Paks

The books said that the problem with autism was in the brain, and that made me feel like a faulty computer, something that should be sent back or scrapped. All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I.

If someone means well, but does ill, the ill is still done - and the consequences still exist. Besides, if intent forgives wrong, then any wrongdoer can claim good intent.

But what about the horses? Have they always had horses here?"

"Probably. Colonial words usually have horses; they're cheap local transportation,self-replicating.

I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.

Paks, if you've got a fault it's that you're too willing to be ruled. I know what you'll say - you'll say that's how a good soldier is.

If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror - as one of her instructors had said - then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.

Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash ... in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

You were not bred to avoid trouble," Tobai said. "Your family takes it on, shakes it like a dog shaking a rat, and tosses it to one side.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.
God is suppose to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.... I think my autism is an accident, but what I do with it is me.

Free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others.

On hers . . . a mess, the teacher had said, but she had already heard the other children exclaim over what she could see for herself. Magnificence, glory, all the things they weren't supposed to have. She woke up with tears still wet on her cheeks, and blinked them out of her eyes. Something vividly red swung in and out of view at the window. Dayvine trumpets, in the breeze - the vine on that side of the house must have grown a foot overnight. Barto had insisted on keeping the house free of vines; she lay there and felt a deep happiness work out from her bones at the sight of those flowers dancing in the sunlight.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

What do you want for them when they're grown? Surround them with people who are that - the kind of adults you want them to be. Children are such mimics ... if they see honesty and fair dealing and kindness, they will copy that.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

She did not want to be Bilong's mother, or her grandmother. She had done with these roles, with being a good child, a good wife, a good mother. She had put seventy-odd years into it; she had worked hard at it; now she wanted to be that Ofelia who painted and carved and sang in an old cracked voice with strange creatures and their stranger music. The

I revear all the gods but those that delight in cruelty. If Ra's light is kindly in your eyes than may his light shine on us all.

I used to not back down from a challenge.

But look at it this way. Anything is a commodity to someone. In a very large universe, your aunt Gracie's cannonballs may be someone else's favorite underwear.

It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong.

People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day - even hour to hour.

It is easy to fool people into thinking I am like everyone else in encounters like this. If the other person likes to talk, as this woman did, it is easier. All I have to say are a few conventional things and smile, and it is done.

Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.
The Speed of Dark

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

His implant woke him at three A.M. local time, when he was, for reasons he never understood, dreaming about dancing fish.

To the gods belong power, and to us the work of our hands.

Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the space wasnt big enough. They told me to put 'brown'. I put 'brown', but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look atr other people's eyes.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

It is all knowing what to start with. If you start in the right place and follow all the steps, you will get to the right end.

Apparently they didn't realize that people who buy thousands of rounds of ammo are likely to know how to use it. We

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.

it is much the same, I daresay, wherever and whenever men desire power and the use of power on others.

You have fought a hard battle, in hard conditions, and held a position until help came. Think of it like that.

I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.

Never show how smart you are, dears, or someone will envy you.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

Of all the trades, my lord Captain, the trade of money itself must be most closely observed. It is too easy to cheat, too easy to shave a coin or pass false coinage, too easy to take as one's own the money entrusted to us by others. We must be diligent, we must be honest, and we must be unfailingly harsh with those who lie to or steal from those who trust them. Else no one will trust any of us, and when that trust fails, we are all back to trading a cow for two pigs or a shirt for a loaf of bread.

I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

And this, she saw, her dream had done. She had built against that fear a vision of power not wholly selfish - power to protect not only herself, but others. And that vision - however partial it had been in those days - was worth following. For it led not away from the fear, as a dream of rule might do, but back into it. The pattern of her life - as she saw it then, clear and far away and painted in bright colors - the pattern of her life was like an intricate song, or the way the Kuakgan talked of the grove's interlacing trees. There below were the dream's roots, tangled in fear and despair, nourished in the death of friends, the bones of the strong, the blood of the living, and there high above were the dream's images, bright in the sun like banners or the flowering trees of spring. And to be that banner, or that flowering branch, meant being nourished by the same fears: meant encompassing them, not rejecting them.