Ann VanderMeer > Quotes

“Love has a right to be spoken. And you have a right to know that somebody loves you. That somebody has loved you, could love you. We all need to know that. Maybe it’s what we need most.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“There is no “makes sense” in the universal sense – that is to say, criticizing a time travel story because its rules do not line up with rules in the real world is akin to dismissing the Harry Potter books because the conductive properties of wood could never sustain the energy required for spell casting.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Because the truth is, fiction is one of the most effective time travel machines in the universe and always has been.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“When we’re talking about whether or not a story’s “time travel logic” makes sense, it is important to remember that every story builds its own framework for its own logic. In that sense, time travel is more of a fantasy-based story element than a science-based one. Time travel does not exist in the real world, and any broadly accepted rules for how it can and can’t work were derived from a bunch of “that guys” talking about time travel fiction. There is no “makes sense” in the universal sense – that is to say, criticizing a time travel story because its rules do not line up with rules in the real world is akin to dismissing the Harry Potter books because the conductive properties of wood could never sustain the energy required for spell casting. Approaching a time travel story with a dogmatic measuring stick in hand also denies the unique pleasure that the genre affords tinkerers. A good story’s internal logic is flawless, and everything in between its first and last word makes sense on its own terms. In that way, it presents the tinkerer with the literary equivalent of an Escher drawing. Internally, step by step, the logic of Escher’s staircase makes (or makes you believe it makes) nefariously perfect sense, and its dissonance with what we know to be possible is not something you have to “just accept and get over to enjoy it,” but is the very source of what’s enjoyable about it.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“But what is life without grumbling, and the occasional opportunity to say, “I told you so”?”
― Ann VanderMeer, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

“The only limitation is that you must leave the past an instant before you depart from the present.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“half-drunken computer”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction

“I began to leaf through it and suddenly I experienced a slight, astonished sense of dizziness that I shall not describe, since this is the story not of my emotions but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction

“that is to say, criticizing a time travel story because its rules do not line up with rules in the real world is akin to dismissing the Harry Potter books because the conductive properties of wood could never sustain the energy required for spell casting.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can’t be done subtly or delicately.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“This kind of eclectic stance also suggests a simple yet effective definition for science fiction: it depicts the future, whether in a stylized or realistic manner.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction

“He had never before realized how young you were when you were young.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“I did not have my tuning fork any longer. Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his measuring rod, and his tuning fork. I believe, sir, that it is indeed this state which constitutes death.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction

“All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another,”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

“With beings like that, beneficence cannot be practiced coherently.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

“charged with public mischief,” Rebecca answered. “Maybe breaking immigration laws, if”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveller's Almanac: The Ultimate Treasury of Time Travel Fiction - Brought to You from the Future

“Every era gets the pope it deserves,” Bishop FitzPatrick observed somewhat gloomily today at breakfast. “The proper pope for our times is a robot, certainly. At some future date it may be desirable for the pope to be a whale, an automobile, a cat, a mountain.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction

“There may even be wormholes and rifts that warp the very nature of the pages. (We cannot recommend the eel-skin 2040 edition, for example, nor the “cheese cloth” edition of 2079.)”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Aorist rods were devices used in a now happily abandoned form of energy production. When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was – the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulging in an extremely expensive form of sentimentality. The past provided a very cheap, plentiful, and clean source of energy, there could always be a few Natural Past Reserves set up if anyone wanted to pay for their upkeep, and as for the claim that draining the past impoverished the present, well, maybe it did, slightly, but the effects were immeasurable and you really had to keep a sense of proportion. It was only when it was realised that the present really was being impoverished, and that the reason for it was that those selfish plundering wastrel bastards up in the future were doing exactly the same thing, that everyone realised that every single aorist rod, and the terrible secret of how they were made, would have to be utterly and forever destroyed.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“all these “wouldn’t it be cool” reasons we’d like to time travel do not get to the root of why we really want to time travel. I think partly it has to do with the cruel cold clockwork of this defined span of years each of us is assigned, the linear piece of chain we’re all rolling across like a gear from beginning to inevitable end.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Time machines are expensive to build and notoriously unpredictable”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac

“determined”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction

“Much happens in the meadow; it is a stage for fervent activity and a theatre of war. But everything serves just one purpose: immortality. The insects who are pursuing their own interests there do not know that they are at the same time fulfilling the flowers’ hidden desires, any more than the flowers understand that to the insects, whom they consider their slaves, they are life and livelihood. Thus the selfishness of each individual works, in the meadow, for the happiness of all.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“Zozulya wrote several stories with a science-fictional quality. In “Story of Ak and Humanity,” citizens vote to bestow total authority on their government, essentially making it totalitarian, and the government reciprocates with a demand that all citizens prove their right to exist, indicating that failure to comply will result in “departure from life” within twenty-four hours. His tale “Moscow of the Future” featured a community of fifty thousand writers, all in their twenties, with no children, with the implication that the children have been taken away to healthier, less subversive zones. “The”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Big Book of Science Fiction