Joan D. Vinge Quotes

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

I love you,' he whispered again, wonderingly, as he understood at last how a lifetime together with someone that you loved could seem like an eternity, and yet not be long enough.

Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.

Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares ... heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.

You've made her so beautiful; when she's come to take your life away.

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?"
"Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.

To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.

How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days!

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.

Things change all the time; but how much of it is real? Does any choice any of us ever makes, no matter how important it seems, really cause a ripple in the greater scheme of things?

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.

Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power." He

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.

A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance ... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.

These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

I am only a cup that knowledge holds. It does not to knowledge matter how poor the cup is. It is the wisdom of those who drink of me that me wise makes. Fools make a sibyl foolish, wherever she is.

Everything changes, today's tears are tomorrow's absurdities, after all.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that ... that gentleness isn't ... weakness.

Yes, she made me love her. But she didn't mean to. She took by giving ... and that makes all the difference.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?

Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.

The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.

He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go.

But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.

There were some things even the rules of an absolute human overlord had no right to deny, and one of them was justice

Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.

Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

Jule was a poet - poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.