Quotes from Joan D. Vinge

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares...heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.

Jule was a poet—poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.

Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.

A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you...just let me love you now.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.

These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.

What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.

Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far.

Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.