Top 65 Marie Brennan Quotes
#1. 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.
Marie Brennan
#2. 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.
Marie Brennan
#3. 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.
Marie Brennan
#4. (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).
Marie Brennan
#5. 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.
Marie Brennan
#7. I have never attempted to hide that I have had two husbands in my life.
I have, however, neglected to mention that in between them, I had a wife.
Marie Brennan
#8. Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.
Marie Brennan
#9. At no point did I form the conscious intention of founding an ad hoc university in my sitting room. It happened, as it were, by accident.
Marie Brennan
#10. Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.
Marie Brennan
#11. 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.
Marie Brennan
#12. ...A widow has freedoms a wife does not. But when I look at you, I do not see obstacles for my career, I see-" My face burned even more. "I see wings. A way to fly higher and further than I can on my own.
Marie Brennan
#13. 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.
Marie Brennan
#14. 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 ...
Marie Brennan
#15. 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.
Marie Brennan
#16. All hail that bane of the upper class, a scene. The spectre of being publicly shamed
Marie Brennan
#17. I marked the extraordinary lightness of the thing. It was necessary; the weight of an ordinary bone would never have allowed something so large as a dragon to fly.
Marie Brennan
#18. My mood depends heavily on what happens to me right after I get up.
Marie Brennan
#19. I have often found this to be true since, that matters which seem terribly important in the early days of such a journey (what will people back home say?) fade into triviality with the passage of time.
Marie Brennan
#20. 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.
Marie Brennan
#21. 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
Marie Brennan
#22. 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.
Marie Brennan
#23. I would choose the heat above an equal degree of chill. The evidence of natural history points to a tropical origin for our species, and I believe it to be true.
Marie Brennan
#25. The hunt for spouses is an activity on a par with fox-hunting or hawking, though the weapons and dramatis personae differ. Just as grizzled old men know the habits of hares and quail, so do elegant society gossips know every titbit about the year's eligible men and women.
Marie Brennan
#26. There's a bit of difference between swimming in shark-infested water because you're trying to retrieve something from the bottom, and staying in just because you're already there and haven't been eaten yet.
Marie Brennan
#27. I read a lot of the 'Pern books' growing up - basically up through 'All the Weyrs of Pern,' maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she's probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.
Marie Brennan
#28. 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.
Marie Brennan
#29. The roughness on the under side of the wing comes from tiny scales, which are not present on the upper surface. These cover tiny holes that perforate the wing, and are hinged to form tiny scales, which are not present on the upper surface.
Marie Brennan
#30. There is no faster way to harden my determination than to assume I will fail at something.
Marie Brennan
#31. So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.
Marie Brennan
#32. There are proverbs about frying pans and fires that I might have quoted to myself, but I preferred to adapt a different one to my purposes: better the devil that would attack everyone impartially than the devil specifically looking to kill us.
Marie Brennan
#33. 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
Marie Brennan
#34. I didn't really distinguish between genre and not-genre as a kid, until I made the transition to adult fantasy via Terry Brooks.
Marie Brennan
#35. 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.
Marie Brennan
#36. 'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.
Marie Brennan
#37. There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.
Marie Brennan
#38. If you wish, gentle reader, you may augment your mental tableau with dramatic orchestral accompaniment.
Marie Brennan
#39. He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.
Marie Brennan
#40. I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.
Marie Brennan
#41. For even the best artwork is a static thing of the eye alone, and words are by their nature linear.
Marie Brennan
#42. More shouts, and then my father was there, staring down at me in horror: the minor pagan god, appalled at what his worshiper had done.
Marie Brennan
#43. Our wisdom grows not by staking out claims and defending them against all comers, but by sharing information freely, so that we may work together for the betterment of all.
Marie Brennan
#44. The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.
Marie Brennan
#45. 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.
Marie Brennan
#46. Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.
Marie Brennan
#47. 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.
Marie Brennan
#48. 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.
Marie Brennan
#49. 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.
Marie Brennan
#50. But coming to terms with one's sorrow is one thing; sharing it with strangers is quite another.
Marie Brennan
#51. 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.
Marie Brennan
#52. I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrified - not enough to turn back
Marie Brennan
#53. One does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger.
Marie Brennan
#54. 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.
Marie Brennan
#55. 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.
Marie Brennan
#56. 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.
Marie Brennan
#57. ... 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.
Marie Brennan
#58. The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.
Marie Brennan
#59. (On no trip before or since have I carried more alcohol than undergarments.)
Marie Brennan
#60. That should be my epitaph when I die 'she did not have to do it'.
Marie Brennan
#61. 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.
Marie Brennan
#62. I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.
Marie Brennan
#63. 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.
Marie Brennan
#64. 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.
Marie Brennan
#65. Miriam snorted. It was not a very ladylike snort. She was the sort of woman one expected to find tramping the countryside in tweeds with a gun under her arm and a bulldog at her side, probably one of her own breeding.
Marie Brennan
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