Joan D. Vinge Quotes

#1. The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#2. Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything ... and not doing it only because you can. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#3. Everything changes, today's tears are tomorrow's absurdities, after all. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#4. You've made her so beautiful; when she's come to take your life away. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#5. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#6. Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#7. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#8. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#9. Jule was a poet - poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#10. Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#11. Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that ... that gentleness isn't ... weakness. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#12. 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? - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#13. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#14. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#15. Yes, she made me love her. But she didn't mean to. She took by giving ... and that makes all the difference. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#16. Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#17. What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#18. Sometimes she talked like a poet; she made a little joke of it, so that you wouldn't mind. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#19. Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#20. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#21. Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#22. The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#23. Myth is, after all, the neverending story. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#24. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#25. 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 - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#26. Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#27. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#28. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#29. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#30. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#31. 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? - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#32. Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#33. All [people] are intolerant ... Only they're intolerant of different things. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#34. As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#35. What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#36. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#37. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#38. Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#39. Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don't we? We have to go on looking for justice ... and settling for revenge. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#40. Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#41. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#42. All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become doctors? Except for the sadists, of course, who simply enjoy the blood and the pain. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#43. There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#44. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#45. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#46. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#47. 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. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#48. Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#49. It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you ... just let me love you now. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#50. Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#51. A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life. - Author: Joan D. Vinge

#52. For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever. - Author: Joan D. Vinge