Just a guy on the internet
- You're all missing the point here, don't confuse your score with your skill
I see a lot of you complain about excessive or weird punctuation because it messes up your scores, and I can't help but think you're all missing the point. The objective here isn't to get a high score, it's to type effectively and efficiently. Your score is supposed to reflect your skill, but it doesn't mean anything if you increase it artificially by only doing easy quotes. Aim to improve your skill, not your score.
Neil Gaiman
- Stories are long-lived organisms. They're bigger and older than we are.
The human lifespan seems incredibly short and frustrating, and for me, one of the best things about being a reader, let alone a writer, is being able to read ancient Greek stories, ancient Egyptian stories, Norse stories - to be able to feel like one is getting the long view. Stories are long-lived organisms. They're bigger and older than we are.
John Cameron Mitchell
- The Origin of Love, Hedwig and The Angry. Adapted from Arestophane's speech in Plato's Symposium
When the earth was still flat; and the clouds made of fire; and the mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher. Folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs; they had two sets of arms, they had two sets of legs; they had two faces peering out of one giant head; so they could watch all around them as they talked while they read; and they never knew nothing of love; it was before the origin of love.
Orson Scott Card
- Ender's Game, Introduction - The True Story
The "true" story is not the one that exists in my mind... The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.
Neil Gaiman
- American Gods - Religions are Metaphors
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs... Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- "No intrinsic worth" - Blue Mars
"It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth." "That's just like saying there is no intrinsic worth...
Stephen Splatz
- Pornography
The best way to distinguish a work of pornography from a conventional narrative is to look at its structure. All narratives, to some extent, are concerned with such things as character, plot, exposition, development, climax and resolution; but in pornography these are merely nods to propriety, threadbare garments which barely conceal the real purpose of the narrative: to deliver a particular kind of gratification again and again.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Green Mars, The deep chasm of all their years
Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness - at least that particular happiness - for her.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "What words ask for"
"What can I say, friends?" he cried. "This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for." But his blood ran high with adrenaline, with tequila and omegandorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. "Look" he said, " here we are on Mars!"
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "This too shall pass"
The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message 'This Too Will Pass.'
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "Love thrilled the chord of love in my lute..."
He stood, reeling; all of a sudden he understood that one didn't have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before. "Love thrilled the chord of love in my lute..."
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "we can never see anything but our own faces"
"I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces."
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "History is Lamarckian!"
No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!
