novelist, writer, poet, musician
1951
The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.
The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.
Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors. And this I will tell you as well: One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none.
There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.
When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.
If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?
I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not something I’ll let happen to me again.
That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.
The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.
Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it.
It's the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that is more important than the actual answer. It's good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there's more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.
The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.
The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.
A body of work may be reviled — mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings — and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.
It's not the work or the personality of the founder of a religion that's important, but what its followers do with what they learn...
I love this world … That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was in when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.
It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy.
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused — hence all the old tales of elfin Kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive. … That is a lie. All they require is our recognition.
Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
They stood and listened, arms around each other for comfort, as the sound washed over them. It reverberated in the marrow of their bones, sung high and sweet, heartbreakingly mournful, quick as a jig, slow as the saddest air. Their hearts swelled with its beauty, its mystery. With all it revealed, and all that it hid.
While you live … you have a duty to life. … The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. … Otherwise they fade away.
Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of — heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.
He had seen trances before — wise men far in the east, who could feign death; a herbwife as she bent over her patient, searching for invisible hurts. Presences...
One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?
I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.
I've always had these bouts of depression; I hide them well but doesn't mean they aren't there. … I didn't have anyone around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better.
I don't know why I care what people write about me after I'm dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I'd hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don't care what they might think of me; but I don't want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.
“Often,” he says, “what we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.”
The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel.
Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.
What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer.
There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.
Our time’s the most precious thing we’ve got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us.
The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.
That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.
When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different.
You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn’t change the fact that some things are real and some things aren’t. There’s a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy.
A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.
Only fools think they’re wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.
“You’re confusing me.”“But not deliberately so,” Coyote says. “Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.”
You’re not a nun, are you? You haven’t taken one of those absurd vows that cut you off from what otherwise might be a full and healthy human existence?
The thing is … nothing’s as easy as we'd like it to be. … And the real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?
The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary.
By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
Life’s like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.
If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.
Nothing’s different, but everything has changed.
Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.
The best artists know what to leave out.
Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.
I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.