"I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting."
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Quote collection
Elizabeth Moon quotes (page 1 of 3)
46 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person."
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"Normal' is a dryer setting."
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"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."
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"I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?"
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"One of my degrees was a science degree in biology."
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"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."
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"I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir."
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"Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus."
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"My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Fantasy allows you to get past defenses."
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"Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind."
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"No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully."
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"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."
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