Quote of the week

"Fearing, you climbed the Mountain. Fearing, you faced its dangers. And fearing, you went on. That is real bravery, Rowan. Only fools do not fear."


Emily Rodda in Rowan of Rin

Quote of the week

"Me job as lookout allowed me to watch all kinds of people: poor, well off, and bloody rich. ... First-class passengers ain't so different from the second-class or the third. They all use the loo. They all go in to dinner. They all laugh and cry. They all have a future. They all have a plan. They all hold hands with their little ones."


Allan Wolf in The Watch That Ends the Night

Quote of the week

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” 

Terry Pratchett in Men at Arms

Quote of the week

"Courage is not something you have, like a sum of money, more or less in a pouch - it cannot be lost, like money spilling out. Courage is inherent in all creatures; it is the quality that keeps them alive, because they endure."


Elizabeth Moon in Oath of Gold

Quote of the week

"Ordinary people, he had noticed, tended to do what they were told, as long as they were given orders by someone who was a recognized authority. Or, as long as the orders did not affect their own lives very much, they would support the orders through simple inaction. If you made changes gradual, and made them seem reasonable, no one really cared about them.

And the changes mounted, imperceptibly, until one day people who had been "good neighbors"—which basically meant that they had not disturbed each other and had no serious quarrels with each other—were now deadly enemies. And it all seemed perfectly reasonable by then."

Mercedes Lackey in The Robin and the Kestrel

Queerly Loving Now Out

The anthology Queerly Loving, containing my story "Birthday Landscapes" is now out.

Enjoy!

Quote of the week

"It's possible to like bad people, but liking them doesn't make them good."


Elizabeth Moon in Sheepfarmer's Daughter

Quote of the week

"However, the reason that these little, petty annoyances worry me is that they seem to have been formulated, by accident or deliberately, to undermine a great deal of the progress that has been made here in the last few centuries. Progress in cooperation, that is." The Deliambren's expression was a brooding one. "Each little action seems designed to strike in such a way that the group that is acted against is quite certain that the actions against them are far more important than the petty annoyances of other groups."

 Mercedes Lackey in The Robin and the Kestrel

Quote of the week

"It is hard to get comfortable people to do anything when it might cost them their comfort."


Tamora Pierce in Trickster's Queen

Quote of the week

"If you want to make your enemy into something you can hate, you first remove his humanity... Make them only icons. When they are seen as a type, and not as individuals, they are easy for a fanatical mind to grasp - and hate."


Mercedes Lackey in Storm Warning

Quote of the week

“I wanted to have something good to remember about today,” she replied quietly. “Something that wasn't petty and mean. Sometimes you have to provide such moments yourself.” 

Tamora Pierce in Trickster's Queen

Quote of the week

“Experience suggests it doesn’t matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.”


Lois McMaster Bujold

Quote of the week

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."


 Upton Sinclair

Quote of the week

"I'm thinking as how it would take a mighty stupid person to be making that particular mistake."

"And has it been your observation that most blind, pigheaded, dyed-in-the-wool bigots aren't stupid?" Kaeritha inquired.

"Not to mention easy to manipulate," Brandark added, and Bahzell nodded unhappily.

"Aye, there's truth enough in that," he conceded. "I'd sooner be able to say there wasn't, but wishing won't make it so."

David Weber in Wind Rider's Oath

Quote of the week

"Some of them will refuse to believe [the truth], for to do so would require them to give up too much of the hatred in which they have invested their lives."

David Weber in The War God's Own

Queerly Loving: cover release

(Image: A bookcover for Queerly Loving anthology vol. 1, full of rainbows and people of all colours)

Cover release! I have a story in this one called "Birthday Landscapes" about an aromantic warrior-mage home on leave in time to celebrate his kids' birthday.

Quote of the week

"If a [racist] thing does not mean anything, why should it be said?"


Agatha Christie in Hickory Dickory Dock

Quote of the week

"You can't convince bigots and you can't kill them. All you can do is your best in the opposite direction."


Susan Cooper in Silver on the Tree

Quote of the week

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”


Terry Pratchett in Carpe Jugulum

Quote of the week

" 'Asshole' is not a protected class under the law."


John Scalzi

Quote of the week

"Joking is not the same thing as humor."


John Scalzi in The End of all Things

Quote of the Week

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."


James Baldwin

Quote of the week

"Age and wisdom don’t necessarily go together. Some people just become stupid with more authority."


Terry Pratchett in Thief of Time

Quote of the week

" 'There are, and always will be, people who are so loyal to their leader that they will believe no evil of him, even if he were to commit the murder of an innocent before their faces,' Kaleth replied with a heavy sigh. 'They would say that the victim was a threat, or that the leader was mistaken, or worst of all, convince themselves that the victim somehow deserved it and brought the punishment on himself.'"


Mercedes Lackey in Sanctuary

Quote of the week

"They want us [women] to be decorative and looking for attention, and then, if one of us is a little more blatant about going about it than the rest, she's blamed for being exactly the way they tell us we're supposed to be."


Shira Glassman in A Harvest of Ripe Figs

Quote of the week

"The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." 


Ursula Le Guin

Quote of the week

"Kiron thought silently of all the ways that one could profit from war. The making of weapons, certainly. The supply of tents, of food for the army, of horses, of other gear, from cooking pots to the linen for bandages.
...
'Consider that our thought was right. ...' Kiron said bluntly. 'Is it so short a step from [profiting off] dead soldiers to [profiting off the deaths] of children?' "


Mercedes Lackey in Alta 

Quote of the week

“It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.”


Rosemary Sutcliff, in The Lantern Bearers

Quote of the week

“Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.”



Nye Bevan

Quote of the week

"No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested.  The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence."


Terry Pratchett, in Reaper Man

Quote of the week

"Assholes are universal.
Everyone has one.
Most people are smart enough not to display theirs in public."

Quote of the week

"Every morning a priest goes into the Houses of Parliament, looks around at the assembled members, and prays that God will have mercy upon the nation."

Quote of the week

"Your power is only rumour and lies, she thought. You bore your way into people when they are uncertain and weak and worried and frightened, and they think their enemy is other people when their enemy is, and always will be, you - the master of lies."


Terry Pratchett in I Shall Wear Midnight

Quote of the week

“Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.”






Jasper Fforde in The Eyre Affair

Quote of the week

"It's like [the supporters of the government] want to be lied to because it's so familiar, or because it keeps them in their comfort zone by absolving them of the need to actually think about things."



David Weber in A Rising Thunder

Quote of the week

"Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity. Conversely, wherever the art of Medicine is hated, there is also a hatred of Humanity."

 

Butterflies over Jordan

Butterflies Over Jordan

 I looked across the water
and what did I see?

I saw:
Spiteful children
tearing off the wings
of the butterfly
that was once
America
emerging from its cocoon.

Quote of the week

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”



Napoléon Bonaparte

Quote of the week

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense."


Dwight D. Eisenhower

Quote of the week

“People and land, they’re the same. Neglect one and the other suffers eventually.” 


Trudi Canavan, in The Magician's Apprentice

Quote of the week

"There's always a bit of truth in each rumour, the trouble is finding out which bit."


Trudi Canavan in The Novice

Quote of the week

"Evil is a kind of oblivion, having destroyed everything on its way there."


Robin McKinley, in Sunshine

Quote of the week

"Darkness does not extinguish a candleflame. Darkness only makes it shine brighter."

Quote of the week

"When times are bad and things are going badly, people do not seek the causes. They seek someone to blame."


L E Modesitt, Jr in Imager

Quote of the week

“Mistresses, have you ever noticed that when we disagree with a male – I hesitate to say ‘man’ – or find ourselves in a position over males, the first comment they make is always about our reputations or our monthlies?”


Tamora Pierce in Lady Knight

Quote of the week

"People aren't logical. They just use logic as needed to justify what they already believe. In governing, you have to appeal to their beliefs...or minimize the impact of those beliefs when what you are or what you're doing stands against those beliefs."


L E Modesitt, Jr in Imager's Challenge

Quote of the week

"Government is what takes care of things beyond you. Good government cares for the well-being of the people it serves. Abusive government cares only for its own well-being."

Mercedes Lackey in The Lark and the Wren

Quote of the week

"Politics is the interaction of the tangible with the intangible, as defined by the unstoppable force running headfirst into the immovable object, and then blaming the object for its headache."

Quote of the week

"What is courage? It is to give when hope is gone, when there is no chance that men may call you a hero, when you have tried and failed and rise to try again."

Mercedes Lackey in The Eagle and the Nightingales

What I couldn't tell you - review

I reviewed another book. This time it was called 'What I Couldn't Tell You' and you can read the review here.

Quote of the week

“Sometimes you should follow the arrogance. You should look for those who can’t believe that the law would ever catch them, who believe that they act out of a right the rest of us do not have. The job of the officer of the law is to let them know they are wrong.”


Terry  Pratchett, in Snuff

Quote of the Week

"The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning."

 

Terry Pratchett in Lords and Ladies