L. Timmel Duchamp > Quotes

“The only stories that cease to live and breathe after they’ve been told are those that end in perfect, unchanging bliss — “happily ever after” — or with the definitive death of their focal character(s). Most other stories, though, remain unfinished, hanging on into the present, projecting their own spectral future, intangible, problematic, messy. They can never be perfect objects, complete and, in the viewer’s mind, hypostasized. Unceasing bliss or definitive, perfect death are called the classical modes of drama for a reason.”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“She gripped the edge of it and glared at Imogen. “I find your attitude offensive. Even in your silly version of that play, one thing still managed to come through, and that’s the critical importance of law and order in civic life. It was the lack of good public order, the lack of adherence to the law that generated all the violence that comes about in that play, not Creon’s irrationality per se.” “Obey, obey whatever the person in possession of the greatest physical force orders?” Imogen’s derisive tone mocked Madeleine. “Law is always better than the violence and selfishness of chaos,” Madeleine said. Law could be repressive, yes: but think of all the evil that the elimination of law would unleash.”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“Here on Frogmore, those who govern share a set of cultural practices and values entirely alien to the various cultural groups that together make up a super-majority population. Each member of that super-majority is in theory “allowed” to live in accordance with their cultural traditions and customs. In practice, however, they are in every respect treated as isolated monads assumed to share the cultural values and practices of the rulers. This assumption effectively strips them of their culture in every important context, rendering their cultural context invisible, allowing the rulers’ cultural values to be projected onto them as though they were blank slates. Thus, their voices are inaudible and unintelligible when the policies that affect them are being framed. And thus justice, in the rulers’ courts of law, is an utter impossibility.”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“Aware of the governor’s number-three offspring watching her manage the difficult task of conveying a bit of pastry into her biological mouth ~ her carved jade utensil with its long hook made it possible, but the point was to eat as gracefully as one would sans facial design ~ Inez grew irritated. She sensed the entire table watching her.”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“The major sighed. “It’s a cultural thing, Madam. Something to do with the embattled mentality they developed in the first centuries here when conditions were so harsh and they had no other way than the exoskeletal-mutations route. The only ones who think of full connection as essential are the ones who’ve gone to university on Pleth and had the visible exoskeletal mutations removed and acquired internal reinforcements — which, as I understand it, serves as a sort of rite of passage to adulthood.”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“I was too young and naive at the time to hold onto newspapers and the ad hoc ephemera figures like Margaret A. invariably generate, and certainly never dreamed that her words could be expunged from the internet. And like most people I never dreamed a person's words could be illegal.”
― L. Timmel Duchamp

“Nathalie dropped into a crouch and fastened braces around her ankles, binding the soles of her feet with the broad bands of fabric holding the strange little knobs and springs and magnets (at least Inez thought they must be magnets). Each time a brace was clicked into place, a tiny green light on the clasp glinted. Inez cleared her throat, uncertain that Nathalie was even listening. “Perhaps you could ask after her and then message me which dome she’s in?” Nathalie”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“Hadn’t we come here to escape rules? But these rules are of our own making, Vi shot back. Don’t you see, rules will be made whether we make them or not. And if we don’t make them, then we will be subject again to fragmentation, division, alienation. And the children we bear will automatically come to be regarded as products — even if we aren’t paid to produce them — and then there will be legal questions about assigning parentage for these “products” (for which we, being the bearers etc., will be considered mere surrogates, since no parent ever serves such functions in the production of a child). Someone with greater authority will move in on us and say we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re flouting all the known rules of the best way of producing children, obviously we’re the primitives they have always said we are. Frogmore,”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“They leave the viewer free of the story itself, which after its telling is finished has become a memory (often pleasurable) set firmly in the past, available for revisiting at will, but contained. In order to emphasize this past-ness of classical dramas, some ancients insisted that the drama be set entirely in one place within one local day. Dramas that remain open and unresolved necessarily employ different conventions, techniques, and narrative structures than do those of classical drama as it has developed over the millennia. — Alexandra Jador of Pleth, The Art of Holodrama”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“Why would you think I take your chauvinism personally? I thought we were having an abstract discussion about dance?” “But it’s you who are refusing to keep it abstract,” Allie Sherr said. “You’ve been accusing us of chauvinism, accusing us of ascribing ugliness to all Frogmorians.” “I give up,” Solstice said. “As far as I can make out, you do consider the Frogmore physique ugly. All of you claim that anyone with the average Frogmore body — a body suited to this planet as well as any human body can be — you claim that the average Frogmore body more or less defiles dance, that the Frogmore body is not expressive enough to be appropriate for dance.”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World

“Following her usual custom when visiting the Institute’s artists, Inez entered the waterdancer’s workspace without going through the formality of sounding the chime to request entry. She agreed in principle that the artists should consider their workspaces to be places of inviolable privacy but liked to think of the Institute as a community whose creativity flowed and merged without boundaries and borders — as a garden of activity cross-fertilized and nourished through free interaction among all the Institute’s inhabitants. She”
― L Timmel Duchamp, The Waterdancer's World