Elizabeth Moon Quotes

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

Normal' is a dryer setting.

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash...in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.

Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that.

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.

I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.

Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

Even if a tamed wolf makes a good sheepdog, he will never understand how the sheep feel....You are most fortunate. For having been, as you thought, a coward, and helpless to fight - you know what that is like. You know what bitterness that feeling breeds - you know in your own heart what kind of evil it brings. And so you are most fit to fight it where it occurs.

What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier.

Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the space wasnt big enough. They told me to put 'brown'. I put 'brown', but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look atr other people's eyes.

People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day - even hour to hour.

Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.

This individual does not know where initiative ends and rocket-propelled idiocy begins.

I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance... Maybe my questions matter.

I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.

I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.

One thing nobody can do better than you is be you.

Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women.

To the gods belong power, and to us the work of our hands.

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.

Motivation is the power behind plot.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

I used to not back down from a challenge.

I revear all the gods but those that delight in cruelty. If Ra's light is kindly in your eyes than may his light shine on us all.

It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong.