Quotes from Kij Johnson

I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?

Love and memory and thought and dream ~ My favorite poems have never been written in words.

Waiting required a future to wait for: a falsehood. I know now that there is only now. I remember things that happened months (or what is years?) ago: old -worn-out nows. The future happens, but it is always shaped from a series of nows.

This is the gift of humanity: that it is claimed by the self. None of us...are human unless and until we claim it for ourselves. But nothing can stop that claiming - not the eight million gods nor the spirits nor ghosts. Nothing but ourselves, anyway. And our lives become the poems we were born to tell.

We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.

There would be sadness and nightmares. And there would be lovemaking and the holding close of children and friends and dogs -- affirmations of life in the cold wet night.

She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it. "Women don't dream large dreams," he had said, dismissively. "It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams." Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yes she was disappointed in Carter.

Some people change the world. And some people change the people who change the world, and that's you.

Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.

That night and for years afterward, she had envisioned another dream land, built from the imaginings of powerful women dreamers. Perhaps it would have fewer gods, she thought as she watched the moon vanish over the horizon, leaving her in the darkness of the ninety-seven stars.

He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to his place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.

Because if something does go wrong, you'll need what you're feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.

That's not a goal," Kit said. "Why? Because it's not yours? Which is better, Kit Meinem of Atyar? A single great victory, or a thousand small ones?

If {Death} comes for you?" he said. "Would you be so sanguine then?" She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. "No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.

As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans.

we cannot protect people from the lessons we ourselves have learned.

But he had loved her, or thought he did, and that had brought her, sputtering and gasping, above the surface of his self-regard. The dreamer's sheen and the power of his passion had for a time attracted her, but in the end she had not wanted a life spent treading water in his story.

These cables will fail eventually, these stones will fall—but not the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here.

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

Reon Atescre of Sona Nyl had been slim and laughing-eyed, a lighthearted, fearless man who was not attracted to women, seeing her for what she was and not what he wanted her to be, and therefore an easy companion to her.

He says there are millions of stars, Raba. Millions.

I say this and it is short and sharp, without elegance, like a bark; but I have no idea how else to start. I am only a fox: I have no elegances of language.

Everyone wanted to tell their stories and to know where they fit in their own fudoki. She was not that different.