Joan D. Vinge Quotes

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.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

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.

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

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.

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.

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

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.

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?

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

Theres no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.

It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you...just let me love you now.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.

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.

What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.

A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.

Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.

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.

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything...and not doing it only because you can.

All [people] are intolerant.... Only they're intolerant of different things.

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.

Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

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.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days!