Elizabeth Moon > Quotes

“Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.
God is suppose to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.... I think my autism is an accident, but what I do with it is me.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Normal' is a dryer setting.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Oath of Fealty

“Even if a tamed wolf makes a good sheepdog, he will never understand how the sheep feel....You are most fortunate. For having been, as you thought, a coward, and helpless to fight - you know what that is like. You know what bitterness that feeling breeds - you know in your own heart what kind of evil it brings. And so you are most fit to fight it where it occurs.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Deed of Paksenarrion

“Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“The book answers questions other people have thought of. I have thought of questions they have not answered. I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance.

Maybe my questions matter.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the space wasnt big enough. They told me to put 'brown'. I put 'brown', but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look atr other people's eyes.”
― Elizabeth Moon

“It's possible to like bad people, but liking them doesn't make them good.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Sheepfarmer's Daughter

“If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror—as one of her instructors had said—then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger

“This individual does not know where initiative ends and rocket-propelled idiocy begins.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Marque and Reprisal

“We do not argue that war is better than peace; we are not so stupid as that. But it is not peace when cruelty reigns, when stronger men steal from farmers and craftworkers, when the child can be enslaved or the old thrown out to starve, and no one lifts a hand. That is not peace: that is conquest, and evil.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Deed of Paksenarrion

“Should I tell you the truth I know, or try to guess the untruth you want?”
― Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population

“No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“To the gods belong power, and to us the work of our hands.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Oath of Fealty

“Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population

“Miss Sevier in high school told us the police think we have knives or guns in our pockets and that they have killed people who were just trying to get out their IDs. I think that is wrong, but I read where the court decided it was all right if the police were really scared. Yet if anybody else is really scared of the police it’s not all right for the scared person to kill a policeman.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Intelligent men think up ways to get themselves in tangles a stupid man would never imagine.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Limits of Power

“I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash...in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.”
― Elizabeth Moon

“You don't have to,' I say. 'You are normal. You have a job with tenure. You have Lucia and this house.' I cannot say the rest that I think, that he is easy in his body, that he sees and hears and tastes and feels what others do, so his reality matches theirs.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Yes, she had needed that. She had needed it all her life, without knowing that was what she needed. The joy of creation, of play, had been the empty place unfilled by family and social duties. She would have loved her children better, she thought now, if she had realized how much she herself needed to play, to follow her own childish desire to handle beautiful things and make more beauty.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population

“Nobody but the residents would call this sector the Hub Worlds, unless they thought the rest of the wheel had fallen off.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger

“I like swordwork. It's like riding, that way - it forces concentration, and thus opens up the world.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Oath of Fealty

“But what about the horses? Have they always had horses here?"

"Probably. Colonial words usually have horses; they're cheap local transportation,self-replicating.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Hunting Party

“Never regret the stupidity of enemies,”
― Elizabeth Moon, Sheepfarmer's Daughter

“If someone means well, but does ill, the ill is still done—and the consequences still exist. Besides, if intent forgives wrong, then any wrongdoer can claim good intent.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Legacy of Gird