Kij Johnson Quotes

Everyone wanted to tell their stories and to know where they fit in their own fudoki. She was not that different.

Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.

Never mind,' she said, 'I don't see the point of a God.'
'And I don't see much point in a cat.' the Kami replied.

These cables will fail eventually, these stones will fall - but not the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here.

She hadn't loved Randolph Carter. He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale: the black men of Parg and Kled and Sona Nyl, the gold men of Thorabon and Ophir and Rinar; and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks or sold him food - all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper.

As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans.

There would be sadness and nightmares. And there would be lovemaking and the holding close of children and friends and dogs
affirmations of life in the cold wet night.

Waiting required a future to wait for: a falsehood. I know now that there is only now. I remember things that happened months (or what is years?) ago: old -worn-out nows. The future happens, but it is always shaped from a series of nows.

There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials.

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

in the end she had not wanted a life spent treading water in his story. She still did not - and yet she regarded herself in the glass a little ruefully. To have that choice removed by time and age was painful.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

Love and memory and thought and dream ~
My favorite poems have never been written in words.

We cannot protect people from the lessons we ourselves have learned.

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.

Reon Atescre of Sona Nyl had been slim and laughing-eyed, a lighthearted, fearless man who was not attracted to women, seeing her for what she was and not what he wanted her to be, and therefore an easy companion to her.

If {Death} comes for you?" he said. "Would you be so sanguine then?"
She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. "No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.

I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things.
For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities.
But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?

Humans assign words to things and pretend the words are adequate.

He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to his place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?

Because if something does go wrong, you'll need what you're feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.

All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent. "When the time comes," he said: "When you sail. I will come with you.

Ferrys die, but there is always a Ferry to cross the mist. Bridges and ferryfolk, they are not so different, Kit.

We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.

Cats have a sort of game they play when they meet. A player alternates between watching the strange cat and ignoring her, grooming or examining everything around herself - a dead leaf, a cloud - with complete absorption. It is almost accidental how the two cats approach, a sidelong step and then the sitting again. This often ends in a flurry of spitting and slashing claws, too fast to see clearly, and then one or the other (or both) of the cats leap out of range. The game can have one exchange or many - and is not so different from the first meetings of women.