Kij Johnson > Quotes

“I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things.

For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities.

But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Cats have a sort of game they play when they meet. A player alternates between watching the strange cat and ignoring her, grooming or examining everything around herself - a dead leaf, a cloud - with complete absorption. It is almost accidental how the two cats approach, a sidelong step and then the sitting again. This often ends in a flurry of spitting and slashing claws, too fast to see clearly, and then one or the other (or both) of the cats leap out of range. The game can have one exchange or many - and is not so different from the first meetings of women.”
― Kij Johnson, Fudoki

“Adventures are what happens when an event is flawed, a mark of imperfection.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Love and memory and thought and dream ~
My favorite poems have never been written in words.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Waiting required a future to wait for: a falsehood. I know now that there is only now. I remember things that happened months (or what is years?) ago: old -worn-out nows. The future happens, but it is always shaped from a series of nows.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“This is the gift of humanity: that it is claimed by the self. None of us...are human unless and until we claim it for ourselves. But nothing can stop that claiming - not the eight million gods nor the spirits nor ghosts. Nothing but ourselves, anyway.
And our lives become the poems we were born to tell.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“There would be sadness and nightmares. And there would be lovemaking and the holding close of children and friends and dogs -- affirmations of life in the cold wet night.”
― Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

“We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.”
― Kij Johnson, Fudoki

“She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it.
"Women don't dream large dreams," he had said, dismissively. "It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams."
Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yes she was disappointed in Carter.”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“Some people change the world. And some people change the people who change the world, and that's you.”
― Kij Johnson

“He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to his place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”
― Kij Johnson, Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011

“That night and for years afterward, she had envisioned another dream land, built from the imaginings of powerful women dreamers. Perhaps it would have fewer gods, she thought as she watched the moon vanish over the horizon, leaving her in the darkness of the ninety-seven stars.”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“That's not a goal," Kit said.

"Why? Because it's not yours? Which is better, Kit Meinem of Atyar? A single great victory, or a thousand small ones?”
― Kij Johnson

“If {Death} comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?”
She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”
― Kij Johnson, Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011

“Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.”
― Kij Johnson

“Because if something does go wrong, you'll need what you're feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”
― Kij Johnson, Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011

“These cables will fail eventually, these stones will fall—but not the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here.”
― Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees

“As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans.”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“Some people change the world. And some people change the people who change the world, and that's you.”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“Reon Atescre of Sona Nyl had been slim and laughing-eyed, a lighthearted, fearless man who was not attracted to women, seeing her for what she was and not what he wanted her to be, and therefore an easy companion to her.”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“But he had loved her, or thought he did, and that had brought her, sputtering and gasping, above the surface of his self-regard. The dreamer’s sheen and the power of his passion had for a time attracted her, but in the end she had not wanted a life spent treading water in his story.”
― Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

“I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.”
― Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

“... we cannot protect people from the lessons we ourselves have learned.”
― Kij Johnson

“The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things. A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”
“You never know how things will change you,” Kit said.
“If you don’t, you have not waited to find out.”
― Kij Johnson, Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011

“Everyone wanted to tell their stories and to know where they fit in their own fudoki. She was not that different.”
― Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees

“There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials.”
― Kij Johnson, Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011

“Humans assign words to things and pretend the words are adequate.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman