A Catalog of My Reviews
Some Favorite Authors
Other Book Reviews
Movie, Music and Miscelaneous Reviews
Quotes
- "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers." - H. G. Wells,
War of the Worlds
- "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov's Foundation
- "It has nothing to do with insanity. It's more to do with conscience." - Gibarian, about his suicide, Tarkovsky's Solaris
- "Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent." - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader
- What is best in life? "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!" - Conan, Conan the Barbarian
- "Only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale." - Ivan, Orson Scott Card's Enchantment
- "Marriage isn't a word, it's a sentence." - Sir Percy Blakeney, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1999)
- "Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude." - Ursula K. Le Guin, as quoted by Douglas A. Anderson in Meditations on Middle-Earth
- "This is an age of potted criticism and pre-digested literary opinion." - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
- "Ignorance as a critical qualification is celebrated every time a literary pundit exhibits his sophistication by performing the time-hallowed ceremony of the Ritual Sneers at Tolkien." - Ursula K. Le Guin
- "I have some mainstream literary novels in my head, too -- but those will probably be published under a pseudonym, because in li-fi the fear of writers who have done well in other genres is so paranoid that unless you find a way to be "cool," like the cyberpunks (li-fi people are absolute suckers for coolness, as if they were still in junior high), it's almost impossible to break in without some kind of disguise." - Orson Scott Card (from a SciFi.com interview)
- "Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject-matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience." - Ursula K. Le Guin, tongue in cheek
- "Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife--chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now it's complete because it's ended here.'" - Muad'Dib, from Frank Herbert's Dune
- "If you have become human enough to cry, then all the magic in the world cannot change you back." - Schmendrick the Magician, from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn
- "I don't know what you expect from a man. You know there's a limit to how entertaining they can be. . . . That's all a woman's entitled to. You can always read a good book." - Margaret Munson, Indiscreet
- "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." - Miss Prism, The Importance of Being Earnest
- "Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker." - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
- "Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you." - Miles Vorkosigan, Borders of Infinity
- "So we have an accepted hierarchy of fictional types, with 'literary fiction,' not defined, but consisting almost exclusively of realism, at the top. All other kinds of fiction, the 'genres,' are either spaced out in rapidly descending order of inferiority or simply tossed into a general garbage heap at the bottom. This judgemental system, like all arbitrary hierarchies, promotes ignorance and arrogance. It has seriously deranged the teaching and criticism of fiction for decades by short-circuiting useful critical description, comparison, and assessment. It condones imbecilities on the order of, 'If it's science fiction, it can't be good; if it's good, it can't be science fiction.'" - Ursula K. Le Guin
- "Try to imagine J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy captured in a single two-hour movie or a slim volume you could read in 30 minutes, with the Dark Lord Sauron bellowing, 'Who moved my ring?'" - Jim Collins
- "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." - George Wu, from Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
- "If computers had to make sense they would never have been invented." - Unshelved, May 21, 2007
- "Little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man's thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages." - Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
- "'What's the matter with me that I'm afraid of girls?' Albert asked his logic machine. 'Nothing the matter with you,' the logic machine told him. 'It's logical to be afraid of girls. They seem pretty spooky to me too.'" - Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century
- "There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity." - Severian, The Book of the New Sun
- "Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says." - Gene Wolfe
- "The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y."
"But we're scientists! We're trained to weigh the evidence."
John nodded. "True. In fact, since I like you, I concede the point."
- John and Maya, from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
- "When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. But men of intellect will believe anything--if it appeals to their ego, their vanity, their sense of self-importance." - Edward Abbey
- "Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either." - Edward Abbey
- "Abstract design is all right--for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce--render emotional--his audience, each time." - Jubal Harshaw, from Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
- "What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing." - Professor Bernardo de la Paz, from Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
- "The belief that 'everything' will be freely available to everyone on the Internet, from anywhere, at anytime, is based on unworkable Marxist assumptions about human nature." - Thomas Mann
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