16 quotes
What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity.
Neveryóna (1983)
It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity—and direct it.
Neveryóna (1983)
Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation.
Neveryóna (1983)
‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’
Neveryóna (1983)
To be a bandit is better than to be a slave!
Neveryóna (1983)
Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat.
Neveryóna (1983)
For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity.
Neveryóna (1983)
Pryn felt the reckless freedom of assertion.
Neveryóna (1983)
Slaves are men and women who labor for no pay. Over there are men who do no labor for no pay. The similarity is enough so that they might make the mistake themselves.
Neveryóna (1983)
“It’s a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in—” he grunted, twisting something—“the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s magic.”
Neveryóna (1983)
And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together.
Neveryóna (1983)
That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.
Neveryóna (1983)
With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive.
Neveryóna (1983)
What references she’d overheard were all oblique enough so that, without knowing what they referred to, she’d have no way to interpret them and so hadn’t really heard them at all.
Neveryóna (1983)
Play makes a human being! Work just means you don’t have to feel guilty about playing, which I don’t feel much anyway. Mainly work means I don’t have to suffer the taunts of my friends who wonder why I’m playing as hard as I do!
Neveryóna (1983)
The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?
Neveryóna (1983)