Marie Brennan Quotes

A husband willing to fund a library for his bookish wife is not so easy to obtain; most would see it as a pointless expense. You might, however, find one willing to share his library.

My mood depends heavily on what happens to me right after I get up.

It is not easy to fling oneself down stairs in a skirt; there is always the risk that you will tangle your legs and go headlong. But I made it.

You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick's.

The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.

Will there not be any scandal if she marries *me*? I asked
not quite believing that living in pseudo-wedlock with a half-human foreign transvestite was any improvement over spinsterhood.

Good manners warred with curiosity, and lost.

I believed myself to be ready then; now, with the hindsight brought by greater age, I see myself for the naive and inexperienced young woman I was. We all begin in such a manner, though. There is no quick route to experience.

One does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger.

Entomologists trap insects in their killing jars and then pin their corpses to cards, and no one utters a single squeak of protest. For that matter, let a gentleman hunt a tiger for its skin, and everyone applauds his courage. But to shoot a dragon for science? That, for some reason, is cruel.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

(where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures' intimate lives).

And all the while I have people telling me, at least you still have something of your husband. Do they mean the book chronicling our work in Vystrana? No, of course not - never mind that we undertook that work together, with intent. That cannot possibly be as valuable as the accidental consequence of biology."

Very quietly, Tom said, "Is not a child worth more than a book?"

"Yes," I said violently. "But then for God's sake let us value my son for himself, and not as some relic of his father. When he is grown enough to read, I will be delighted to share his father's legacy with him; it is my legacy as well, and I hope he has inherited our curiosity enough to appreciate it. I would not mind a motherhood where that was my purpose - to foster my son's mind and teach him the intellectual values of his parents. But no; society tells me my role is to change his napkins and coo over the faces he makes, and in so doing abandon the things I want him to treasure when he is grown.

I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.

Another thing to study," Natalie said, amused. "Will you ever be done?"

I smiled into the sun, one hand holding my bonnet against the firm grasp of the wind. "I should hope not. How dreadfully tedious that would be.

... There may not be even two men living in the world whom I would have agreed to marry, certainly not on such short notice. But I do not need two; I only need one.

I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrified - not enough to turn back

That should be my epitaph when I die 'she did not have to do it'.

I'm the sort of person who, once I put dragons into the real world, feels obliged to think about how their presence would have changed history.

Once we love, we cannot revoke it,' she said. 'We can only glory in what it brings
pain as well as joy, grief as well as hope.

They say there are no atheists in war; I tell you that pantheists abound at the edge of a cliff. I would have taken the blessing of any god I could get.

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.

Their characteristics are well-known. They're beautiful
when they're not astoundingly ugly. They're both goddesses for men to worship, and demons for them to flee. They adore children, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession. They have a strong association with nature, from which they're often assumed to draw magical power. Their anger is a terrible thing to behold, and all the more fearsome because anything can spark it; the rules by which these creatures operate are not those of rational men. They are creatures of fanciful whim, and they never, ever, can be understood.
I'm talking, of course, about women.

Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

Its Scaled hide was dull brown That fitted in well with our surrounding, and its eyes a disturbing crimson. The low slung body featured powerful legs ending in scythelike claws anda long, flexible tail that moved hypnotically back and forth, like a cat's. Just behind its shoulders a pair of vestigial wings shifted and settled.

I honestly cannot tell whether you are the most practical women I have ever met or the most deranged."
"Why can't I be both

When I'm working on a novel, I generally do write every day, but in between those marathons, I take breaks. My brain needs time to recharge.

There was a brief period of time when I was very young where I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian - largely because I liked cats - but then somebody told me I would have to cut animals open, and that was the end of that.

I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization.
There is a proverb, which Tom was kind enough not to voice: be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, not only did I get it, but so did those around me.

I sometimes imagine there is a clerk behind a desk situated between the brain and the mouth. It is his job to examine utterances on their way out, and stamp them with approval or send them back for reconsideration. If such a clerk exists, mine must be very harried and overworked; and on occasion he puts his head down on the desk in despair, letting things pass without so much as a second glance. Suhail

'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.

But rumour is a creature with many heads and no body, and I had no way to hunt it, any more than I could smooth over matters with my new relations.

It's - it's as if there is a dragon inside me. I don't know how big she is; she may still be growing. But she has wings, and strength, and - and I can't keep her in a cage. She'll die. I'll die. I know it isn't modest to say these things, but I know I'm capable of more than life in Scirland will allow. It's all right for women to study theology, or literature, but nothing so rough and ready as this. And yet this is what I want. Even if it's hard, even if it's dangerous. I don't care. I need to see where my wings can carry me.

This was London, in all its filth and glory. Nostalgic for the past, while yearning to cast off the chains of bygone ages and step forward into the bright utopia of the future. Proud of its achievements, yet despising its own flaws. A monster in both size and nature, that would consume the unwary and spit them out again, in forms unrecognizable and undreamt.
London, the monster city.

Just as Manda Lewis's impressions of the world had been informed by her reading
leading her to expect balls, duels, and conveniently timed thunderstorms out of life
so, too, had mine; but what I expected was intellectual commerce between equals.

Jake shrugged, in the way that only nine-year-old children can manage
and usually male children at that, girls not being permitted the same kind of insouciance.

I chose my pen name when I was ten, because I knew even then that my legal name would be more trouble than it was worth.

Schools are compulsory for about ten years of a person's life. They are, perhaps, the only compulsory institutions for all citizens, although those with full membership in schools are not yet treated as full citizens of our society ...

Utopias bore me. I'm interested in constructing messy, complicated societies that are full of flaws and then saying, ooh, this is interesting, let's see what happens if I poke it here. And concurrently with this and the previous point, I'm interested in making up cultures that are different

Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud.

Jake pried the head open, giving me a look when I warned him not to cut himself on the teeth. It is a look I think all children master at about his age - the one that insists the looker needs no warning while, by its very confidence, convincing the one looked at that the warning was very necessary indeed.

But coming to terms with one's sorrow is one thing; sharing it with strangers is quite another.

Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.

I didn't really distinguish between genre and not-genre as a kid, until I made the transition to adult fantasy via Terry Brooks.

The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.

I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.

When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work was good enough to be accepted into ibn Khattusi's series -- but of course they never would have taken a submission from a woman, so he submitted it on my behalf. What I said in reply is not fit to be printed here, as by then I had spent a good deal of time in the company of sailors, and had at my disposal a vocabulary not commonly available to ladies of quality.

For even the best artwork is a static thing of the eye alone, and words are by their nature linear.

Characteristic he considered diagnostic of the true dragon. All such Species could expel something additional with their breath, whether it was the legendary fire or otherwise.

Are a woman's wishes only fit to be considered when blessed by a male relative?

I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.

The lack of a husband was, for some applicants, a selling point. I imagine many of my readers are aware of the awkward position in which governesses often find themselves
or, rather, the awkward position into which their male employers often put them, for it does no one any service to pretend this happens by some natural and inexorable process, devoid of connection with anyone's behaviour.