Pamela Dean > Quotes

“Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?”
― Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

“It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.”
― Pamela Dean

“Why do all your friends talk like books?”
― Pamela Dean

“At the moment, if you asked me, I would say that this book is about keeping the heart of flesh in a world that wants to put in a heart of stone; and about how, regardless of the accusations regularly flung at them from all quarters, learning and literature can help their adherents accomplish that.”
― Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

“Do you want some of this cheese, or shall we just go walking?”
― Pamela Dean

“So he decided he would never listen to anybody he knew? That's just like someone in a fairy tale.'

Knowing he had given his trust amiss, how could he bestow it again?'

That's foolish. Did he expect never to make any mistakes?”
― Pamela Dean, The Whim of the Dragon

“I was testing a hypothesis. But it was right, and then I had a unicorn to deal with. You can't just say, 'Thank you so much, go away now' to a unicorn, the way you can with atomic particles.”
― Pamela Dean, The Whim of the Dragon

“Peg was involved in a common form of senior-year panic that caused its victims to exhibit permanent distraction and to take up residence in the library.”
― Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

“Their shadows sported over the hills like cats, chasing the sunlight over sparkling granite and dull slate, the bright dry grass and the small hidden gleams of water.”
― Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills

“Arry thought her mind must be tired. It would not, in a sensible fashion, lie down and rest.”
― Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills

“The library was ... scattered with odd cushions and strange padded built-in furniture added a few years ago to placate the rioting students of the time, who could never seem to make up their minds whether they were angriest about Viet Nam, about being made to learn a foreign language, or about being made to sit at a hard wooden desk while they did it. The College, being unable to do anything about Viet Nam and unwilling to do anything about the foreign language requirement, had reformed the furniture in the library.”
― Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

“My feeling says there is history here. But sometimes a thing might feeltrue to me, not because it is, but because the writer believes it is.”
― Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills

“A collaborative analysis: i.e, he asked questions until he got either the answers he wanted or some other that was acceptable because he had never thought of it.”
― Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

“Seeming and knowing made hideous faces at one another across the breadth of her mind.”
― Pamela Dean

“To survey may be to look out over a landscape from a height; or it may mean to tramp around in the mud with heavy, fragile, cantankerous instruments. Some of my colleagues favor the view from a height; I myself feel that to consider the twentieth century a height of any sort, except that of folly, is in fact foolish. So we will wander in the mud. I think that when you come home again you’ll find that the mud has been on the slopes of mountains. Your instruments you’ll acquire along the way.”
― Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

“It's worse than treachery. He's using force. Is that worse than guile?”
― Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills

“So easily she broke her word. The fire did not cower down nor the wind rise; her heart beat on quietly. Maybe it was more like a disease than an injury: the seed was sown but not yet sprouted. Perjury, shapeshifting: which was more mortal?”
― Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills

“There was a tremendous flash, as the crystal of the Secret Country exploded into a billion colored shards, and a ringing, terrible, sustained crash as the land, from end to end, from the Mountains of the North to the Dubious Hills, from the Wide West Waste to the Sunrise Sea, cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, the boost of heraldry and pomp of power, all that heart heard of or mind expressed, trees, flowers, cottages, and wells, the unicorn, the cardinal, the dragon, and the owl, sun, moon, stars, clouds, the loving detail of High Castle, the barely imagined cities of the Dwarves, the fabulous mines whence came Lord Randolph's ring, the Green Caves and the Magic Wood, King John's solemn tomb, Laura and Ellen downstairs, the stones beneath them and their very bones, shook, rang, shattered, and seemed to collapse in dust.”
― Pamela Dean, The Secret Country

“The wind pounced on them hard. It had blown some of the cloud away and stretched the rest across the sky like rags on a loom to make a rug. A blue and white and gray rug like that would b pretty, thought Arry. But how do I know that? Do I know it?”
― Pamela Dean