Quotes from Vonda N. McIntyre

I don't remember learning to read, but the first thing I remember reading is a science fiction novel.

All her life she had made her own mistakes and her own successes, both usually by trying what others said she could not do.

Pick something else".For an instant's flash Kylis remembered being taunted like this before, when she was very small. Anything but that. Anything but what you really want.

They said everything outside killed, so I thought nothing did.

The patterns the whales used for communication, the three-dimensional shapes, as transparent to sound as solid objects, could express any concept. Any concept except, perhaps, vacuum, infinity, nothingness so complete it would never become anything. The nearest way she could try to describe it was with silence.

How can I tell her to be glad she's alive, when she knows she'll never walk on the desert again, or find me a diamond for some patron's earring, never gentle another horse, never make love?" "I don't know," Smoke said. "But if you and Alex see her life as a tragedy, that's what it will be.

if he lost consciousness still telling me to do nothing, I'd have to let him die. You say yourself he's rational. I have no right to go against his desires. No matter how stupid and wasteful they are.

Her people, like all the other people on earth, were too self-centered, too introspective. Perhaps that was inevitable, for their isolation was well enforced. But as a result the healers has been too shortsighted; by protecting the dreamsnakes, they had kept them from maturing.

The curtains were open to darkness. Arevin had not moved since returning from the observation point, where he had looked down upon the eastern desert and the rolling masses of storm clouds. The killing winds turned sharp-edged sand grains into lethal weapons. In the storm, heavy clothing would not protect Arevin, nor would any amount of courage or desperation. A few moments in the desert would kill him; an hour would strip his bones bare. In the spring no trace of him would be left.

The drive to convert people's minds and hearts has caused more grief, more suffering, more loss of life than any desire for property, riches, or even the necessities of survival.

She knew that nothing she could imagine could approach the strangeness of the expidition's first contact with non-Terrestrial beings. She could not predict what would happen. It was the sense of immersing herself in strangeness that she sought, knowing she would have to meet the reality with equanimity, and wing it from there.

Saavik gazed calmly at the viewscreen. She was aesthetically elegant in the spare, understated, esoterically powerful manner of a Japanese brush-painting.

Vulcan. A desert world, limited in material resources, yet limitless in the intellectual and philosophical achievements of its inhabitants.