James Tiptree Jr. Quotes

#1. 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.

#2. You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

James Tiptree Jr.

#3. [Depression is] like combating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with a handful of popcorn. But that handful of popcorn keeps you going. There is no sense in going on, there is no sense in any of those things, but thank God one does not live by reason alone.

James Tiptree Jr.

#4. Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.

James Tiptree Jr.

#5. 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.

#6. Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial.

James Tiptree Jr.

#7. 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.

#8. Are you . . . a policeman?"
"No. They'll be along shortly, I expect. Public suicide's a felony."
". . . I'm sorry.

James Tiptree Jr.

#9. Ahead lies only the irreversible long decline. For the first time we know there is nothing beyond ourselves.

James Tiptree Jr.

#10. I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.

James Tiptree Jr.

#11. 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.

#12. Being, I imagine, must be very simple. It is Becoming which is so messy and which I am all for.

James Tiptree Jr.

#13. 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.

#14. Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him.

James Tiptree Jr.

#15. Briefly he has lived in a dream more real than all his miserable life.

James Tiptree Jr.

#16. 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.

#17. For dreams that never die.

James Tiptree Jr.

#18. Good is too often allied with vulnerability and evil with power.

James Tiptree Jr.

#19. Absolutes are absolutely dangerous ...

James Tiptree Jr.

#20. Any chance beats no chance.

James Tiptree Jr.

#21. Passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat.

James Tiptree Jr.

#22. 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.

#23. And here is our girl, looking
If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)

James Tiptree Jr.

#24. 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.

#25. All I can say is that laughter is my music; I would deeply suspect an argument which hadn't laughter.

James Tiptree Jr.

#26. 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.

#27. Nothing but the effects of dust and vapor in the thin skin of air whereupon she crawls wingless.

James Tiptree Jr.

#28. With your hand controlling all the input and your eye reading all the response you can make them a god . . . and somebody'll do the same for you.

James Tiptree Jr.

#29. I am one of those that always get accidentally guillotined when the Great Day of Liberation comes, because ... I guess ... I am full of parentheses. Revolutions can't abide parentheses.

James Tiptree Jr.

#30. Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.

James Tiptree Jr.