Sylvia Engdahl
Sylvia Engdahl is the author of eleven science fiction novels, six of which, including the Newbery Honor book Enchantress from the Stars, are YA books also enjoyed by many adults. Although she is best known as an author for Young Adults, her most recent novels, the Founders of Maclairn duology (Stewards of the Flame and Promise of the Flame) and the Captain of Estel trilogy (Defender of the Flame, Herald of the Flame, and Envoy of the Flame) are adult science fiction and are not appropriate for readers below high school age. For FAQs about them and more, visit her website.
She has also written a nonfiction book, The Planet-Girded Suns: Our Forebears' Firm Belief in Inhabited Exoplanets, of which updated and expanded paperback and ebook editions were published in 2012, and three collections of her essays. Most of the nonfiction books listed under her name were edited, rather than written, by her as a freelance editor of anthologies for high schools.
Engdahl says, "I never listed more than a few of the books I read here and now the list is so outdated that i have removed all but a very few that are still among my favorites, plus ebooks I produced for my mother and for my friend Shirley Rousseau Murphy. For current lists of good books on the subjects I care about, please visit the Opinion section of my website."
“It is the only happiness now possible to me, to know that all is well with you”
“People who love each other can no more keep from communicating than from breathing.”
“What is it, I wonder, that makes two people suddenly become important to each other? So important that everything else around them just fades away?”
“The human mind is incredible. It can do nothing without belief, yet practically anything with it.”
“Must a man then live as his fellows live, and never reach beyond?”
“But a light now waxed within him at the knowledge that such wonders as he had been shown could exist.”
“There are different kinds of truth. And if our kind is more mature than theirs, it's so only because we know that.”
“If nobody believed anything except what they understood, how limited we'd be.”
“It's not enough just to learn what there ISN'T; we need to know what there IS.”
“But as long as he kept on caring, nothing could touch the freedom of his inner thoughts.”
“Wherever he went he would be a stranger, for there was no home in the world for such as he.”