James Tiptree Jr Quotes

I think they're gentle," she mutters.

"For Christ's sake, Ruth, they're aliens!"

"I'm used to it," she says absently.

- 'The Women Men Don't See ~ James Tiptree Jr.

All I can say is that laughter is my music; I would deeply suspect an argument which hadn't laughter. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Well, what brand of water do you drink?"
"Just what was in the faucet, sir," says Delphi humbly. "I--I did try to boil it--"
"Good God. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

In the confusions of the next hours the Earth's population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dustbowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

"The Man Who Walked Home ~ James Tiptree Jr.

DOCTOR AIN WAS recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain's huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain's response. He almost turned back to speak, but he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu.

The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: A tall thin nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on.

She saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O'Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman.

- 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain ~ James Tiptree Jr.

I have a cold mind and a warm heart, whereas most people have cold, troubled hearts and warm, muggy minds, which they mistake for sincere feelings. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

I love the alien in people, god I love the wildness, the wit, the lightning of the Other mind. A kind of sex-in-the-head, you know it's a rather Victorian affliction. Something to do with communication. I have had moments of communication with people, often totally unsuitable people, which had a truly unholy intensity... A sort of orgasmic meaningfulness and clarity, you know, all the old romantic stuff - two strangers stop and suddenly exchange glimpses of reality before moving on into the mists. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

For dreams that never die. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Good is too often allied with vulnerability and evil with power. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

I cannot teach
if I teach as teaching should be I become so exhausted I nearly die, I seem to have no middle gear. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Ahead lies only the irreversible long decline. For the first time we know there is nothing beyond ourselves. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

THE ALMOST-INCORPOREAL VASTNESS PUZZLES, LISTENING AS LEVIATHAN MIGHT PUZZLE OVER THE PROBLEMS OF AN ATOM. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

it wasn't an angel.
I think I saw a real estate agent. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

You know, exams are like war
the birth rate of ideas goes up. Anything to keep from this dismal regimen, says poor mind, and hopefully tosses up another distraction. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

- so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off.

"Hurrah for women's lib, eh?"

"The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed."

The apocalyptic word jars my attention.

"What do you mean, doomed?"

She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …"

"Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like - like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

"Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."

No answering smile.

"That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a - a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chink ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Consider how odd it would be if all we knew about elephants had been written by elephants. Would we recognize one? What elephant author would describe--or perhaps even perceive--the features which are common to all elephants? We would find ourselves detecting these from indirect clues; for instance, elephant-naturalists would surely tell us that all other animals suffer from noselessness, which obliges them to use their paws in an unnatural way. [...]So when the human male describes his world he maps its distances from his unspoken natural center of reference, himself. ~ Alice B. Sheldon

Briefly he has lived in a dream more real than all his miserable life. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Bethesda … Would I be wrong in guessing you work for Uncle Sam?"

"Why, yes. You must be very familiar with Washington, Mr. Fenton. Does your work bring you there often?"

Anywhere but on our sandbar the little ploy would have worked. My hunter's gene twitches.

"Which agency are you with?"

She gives up gracefully. "Oh, just GSA records. I'm a librarian."

Of course. I know her now, all the Mrs. Parsonses in records divisions, accounting sections, research branches, personnel and administration offices. Tell Mrs. Parsons we need a recap on the external service contracts for fiscal '73.

- 'The Women Men Don't See ~ James Tiptree Jr.

The only way I can possibly heat my so-called mind up to working temperature is to imagine I'm talking to someone I admire. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

I see her first while the Mexicana 727 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying "Sorry," at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger one in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

- 'The Women Men Don't See' (opening) ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Did you ever look into the personalities of male cooks, Army, logging camp, etc.? They're all supposed to be crazy, incomprehensible, contemptible. And angry. The act of feeding adult males seems to have strange personality effects. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

Passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

To grow up as a "girl" is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to with falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing - and nearly to become that thing. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

I dreamed horse and lived horse and expected, if necessary, to marry a horse; for all practical purposes I was a horse. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

A woman writing of the joy and terror of furious combat, or of the lust of torture and killing, or of the violent forms of evil--isn't taken quite seriously. Because women aren't as capable of violent physical assault--not to speak of rape--as men are[...] So when one who writes about serious, violent evil turns out to be female, some readers may feel cheated--particularly if an action scene has stirred them. Now it all seems flat, even false--'What the hell does she know about real fighting? ~ James Tiptree Jr.

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature ... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'
Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'
When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male. ~ Robert Silverberg

I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions. ~ James Richardson

With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do. ~ James Joyce

Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. ~ Clive James

The root of the black man's hatred is rage,
and he does not so much had the white man
as simply as want the out of his way,
and, more than that,
out of his children's way.

The root of the white man's hatred is terror,
a bottomless and nameless terror,
which focuses on this dread figure,
an entity which lives only in his mind. ~ James Baldwin

Original Sin has great marketing potential. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

almost exquisite, the slight madness ~ James Tate

[I] learnt, for the first time, the joys of substituting hard, disciplined study for the indulgence of day-dreaming. ~ James Black

Cultural categories, in fact, need not constrain us since they can always be used against themselves to open up new possibilities. ~ James M. Redfield

NATO has been supporting Haj pilgrimage for those Afghans who wish to go to Saudi Arabia. The Alliance has played a role in helping transport concerning their security as they leave and come back to Afghanistan. ~ James Appathurai

The sense of success -the most agreeable emotion of the human heart ~ Henry James

Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things? ~ Henry James

Me myself I park in handicap, the reason why ... ya know my bankroll make me walk with a crazy limp. ~ Floyd Mayweather, Jr.

She hoped the menfolk were having a nice, relaxing road trip in that souped-up man car they were riding in because as soon as they got to the Roberts' house, she was pawning off the woman formerly known as her sister onto the dude whose sperm had apparently turned her into a she-devil. ~ Julie James

I do some solo, acoustic stuff, but I also like plugging in my electric guitar and playing loud with a band. ~ James Bay

I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me I'll kill you all. ~ Marine General James Mattis

I was a screen
I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would. ~ Henry James

I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient. ~ James Surowiecki

She laughed. "You're kind. ~ James Patterson

Houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, ~ Henry James

Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine. ~ James Balog

As a parent you protect your kids as much as possible. ~ LeBron James

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained. ~ James Henry Breasted

No, said Jem, because he was always James Carstairs when he spoke of what was dearest to him. Not mine. My parabatai's. W and H. William Herondale. Will ~ Cassandra Clare

The first thing I did when my career started moving was to buy a small house. ~ Freddie Prinze, Jr.

L]iberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism ~ James Luther Adams

f While Mr. William Bradford was absent in the shallop, his wife Dorothy accidentally fell overboard from the Mayflower at Cape Cod and was drowned. ~ James Thacher

for the other sort of intimate acquaintance, ~ James Agee

If you don't know what you want to fill your life with, there's a good chance you're going to fill it with everything that you don't - ~ Josh James Riebock

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. ~ John Forbes Nash, Jr.

We must use time creatively - and forever realize that the time is always hope to do great things. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nobody ever took time out in a boat race," he noted. "There's no place to stop and get a satisfying drink of water or a lungful of cool, invigorating air. You just keep your eyes glued on the red, perspiring neck of the fellow ahead of you and row until they tell you it's all over . . . Neighbor, it's no game for a softy." When you row, the major muscles in your arms, legs, and back - particularly the quadriceps, triceps, biceps, deltoids, latissimus dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteal muscles - do most of the grunt work, propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and wind. At the same time, scores of smaller muscles in the neck, wrists, ~ Daniel James Brown

The result of cutting [political power] up into little bits is simply that the man who can sweep the greatest number into one heap will govern the rest ... In a pure democracy the ruling men will be the wirepullers and their friends; but they will no more be on an equality with the voters than soldiers of Ministers of State are on an equality with the subjects of monarchy. ~ James Fitzjames Stephen

I've been lucky. The critics never went out of their way to single me out for doing bad work. ~ James Caan

She had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality. ~ Henry James

His father placed his elbows on the table and leaned toward him. "We need to know if you are simply ordinary or larger than life." To the best of his ability, he mulled over the notion of being larger than life. "Did you have to go there when you were young?" His father nodded. "Were you afraid?" His father sat back into his tall, brocaded armchair, as if in recall. "In the beginning I was. Until I learned to overcome fear. ~ James Luceno

The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case. ~ James Ellroy

It's not hard to understand why an accomplished director like Gus Van Sant (whose most recent success, Good Will Hunting , gave him mainstream clout) would be interested in making this film. The lure of an exact remake presents a tremendous challenge. Unfortunately, it was undoubtedly a lot more stimulating for Van Sant and his crew to make Psycho than it is for an audience to watch it. [C]uriosity is going to be one of the primary reasons why people pay money to see this movie; boredom will be the predominant result. ~ James Berardinelli

I retain a searing memory of the smell of fresh varnish on wooden floors, and the feeling that I was entering incarceration as I stepped through the door for my first day of kindergarten. ~ James Edwin Turner

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought. ~ James Joyce

Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote. ~ James Shapiro

Sometimes, in the night, it is expectant and therefore eager to be out. It has slept too long and is restless, fighting the force that keeps it patient. Years of internal slumber has drugged it, but not decisively, so that, once slightly touched, it starts and quivers and attempts to announce itself so strongly that, occasionally, a man's mind will wake in his bed and ask itself: Who is there? ~ James Alan McPherson

When you were the son of evil, there was little you couldn't do, own, or kill, and yet her mortal self was an elusive trophy he could touch, but not put on his shelf.
This made her rare. This made her precious.
This made him ... love her. ~ J.R. Ward

Call Audi. I may need the A3 sooner than I thought." "It's ready, Mr. Grey." "Oh. Good. ~ E.L. James

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold ... 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 'T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer. ~ James Russell Lowell

In my life I find that memories of the spirit linger and sweeten long after memories of the brain have faded. ~ Harry Connick, Jr.