Quotes from Judith Tarr

Some books are a revelation. They come along at just the right time for just the right reasons. They become heart books and soul books.

Women in the post-Fifties world were appendages. They existed to serve men. Their lives and concerns didn't matter, except insofar as they impinged on Important Male Things.

Most science fiction is based on our knowledge now and uses that to project the future.

A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.

The more facts one introduces, the more truth one shows, the more determined the bigot is to cling to his belief.

Separation of Church and state was a radical idea when the U.S. was first founded, but it's become The Way Things Are.

The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

I don't cry for humans. I cry for things that are so beautiful I just can't stand it, like Bonnie in front of me, all crusty from rolling in the sand, with a mouthful of half-chewed hay and eyes that knew everything I'd ever thought or felt or been.

Rumors are easy to plant; they grow like no other crop.

My arithmetic is fine, thank you," Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic from what she'd seen was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.

If you and I are only shadows, or faulty conglomerations of the four elements, or a dance of atoms in the void, why is life so sweet?

We all have our midnight madnesses.

The wall of it rose between them, higher than any she could raise with power. Too high by far to leap, too sheer to scale. But a gate—that, God willing, they could build. If she could learn to trust him again. If he could learn to rule his temper.

One acts with dignity," he said, "as much as one may. One compromises only as much as one must, and still remain oneself. And one keeps one's pride, even if one must keep it in secret, where only God can see.

I love you, God help me. Love you, lust for you, and snatch with shameful eagerness at any crumb you deign to drop in front of me.

I am what I am; I've done what I've done. I can't change any of it.

Agni was her brother and she loved him, and he often understood her, but he was a man. In the end he thought as a man thinks, of owning and mastering.

If it were left to men, there'd be nothing in the world but mating and squabbling.

The lion's cub grows into a lion.

We're bound. One soul, the humans say. They don't know the half of it. Wherever you go, I must go; whatever you do, I must be with you. If you hurt, I hurt; your joy is my joy. We can never be free again.

Yes, I do have a soft spot for complicated villains who can't help themselves.

Rawn did her own thing in her own way. She cast the female gaze on a genre heavy with all-male quest fellowships, trophy females, and the occasional Smurfette. Her world was male-dominated and highly patriarchal, but she populated it with notable numbers of well-drawn female characters.

I like going back in time and writing historical fantasy. I use some real historical characters as a background to give depth to the fantasy. And I throw my fictional characters into the midst of this, and, so far, it has turned out interesting.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.