Quotations that I like and love (a living list, alphabetized by author)

• Brown, Margaret Wise
• Galbraith, John Kenneth
• Mieville, China
• Schulz, Bruno
• Whitehead, Colson

Sense only makes sense in contrast to Nonsense. I think that is why children are so amused by Nonsense. Also because our “Sense” often makes so little sense to them, this Nonsense of our so-called sense becomes a private joke among children.

Margaret Wise Brown

Source: Brown, Margaret Wise. 1951. “Creative writing for very young children” in The Book of Knowledge: 1951 Annual. E.V. McLoughlin, ed. The Grolier Society, New York City, NY.

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1971. Chapter 3: How Keynes Came to America, in A Contemporary Guide to Economics, Peace, and Laughter, edited by Andrea D. Williams. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, Massachusetts. p.50

I think that speculative fiction, and all fiction, inevitably, is about the world around it. You can’t write or read without society being in the chair with you. I think that you might as well know that, and use it to texture your fiction. Obviously that doesn’t mean you have to accept – or even be conscious of – my politics, to read the story. That’s why it’s fiction.

China Mieville

Source: Chouinard, Gabriel. 2001. Interview with China Mieville. Infinity Plus Books. London, UK.

“There are things than cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to loose their integrity in the frailty of realization.”

Bruno Schulz

Source: Schulz, Bruno. 1937 (English edition 1978). Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Walker and Company, New York City, NY

Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure. You cannot find the words, the words will not allow you to find them in time for the departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words. Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul’s receptors and translated into true speech.

Colson Whitehead

Source: Whitehead, Colson. 1999. The Intuitionist. Anchor Books, New York City, NY.