Geoff Ryman

“Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader.”

“Once there was a dictator. He drove millions to various kinds of deaths, by war, in prison, or simply in harsh deserts farming their lives away. He destroyed temples, burned books, and ruined the art of calligraphy. He wrote terrible poetry and forced everyone to learn it, so destroying the literary taste of one quarter of humanity. He remained a warrior even as Chairman. He was at his best as a warrior, because as a warrior, he was fighting for his people, dreaming for them. After that, he only ground them down. But I forgive him for saying one beautiful thing:'Women hold up half the sky.' -- Chairman Mao Tse Tung”

“She thought she was brave, but she did not have that kind of courage. To face the men who controlled the torturers, the lists, the surveillance, and say: I am going to do the very thing you say I must not do.And yet they were right.How were things to get better if no one fought?”

“You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.”

“This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.”

“You know, all the evil in the world, all the sadness comes from not having a good answer to that question: What do I do next? You just keep thinking of good things to do, lad. You'll be all right. We'll all be all right. I wanted you to know that.”

“I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.”

“In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.”

“Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.”

“It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.”

“Everything goes, everything is lost, eventually. But if something is good, it doesn't matter what happens. The ending is still happy.”

“Tyranny is a form of perversion. We come to love it. Every government is a tyranny to a degree, and the more evil it is, the more it is loved. The difficulty lies in judging the degree of tyranny under which you live.”

“Sex complicates, but it is the power of love to simplify.”

“In the silence, nothing was fragmented. There were no separate strands to gather together, to fumble, to complete for attention. In the silence, all of that fell away, and there was only what was here, and what was to be done.”

“The music comes out of the silence. I don't mind if it goes back in. We come out of the silence...”

“Everything move...you wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That's how he was built. So we don't know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds. ”

“God, the woman must have been a pain. When she was alive.”

“She saw the children. They have been given viruses to educate them. From three weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made adult, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love. They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.”

“There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it.”

“He might as well have been talking English, for all Mae understood him.”