Geoff Ryman > Quotes

“Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.”
― Geoff Ryman

“In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

“Sex complicates, but it is the power of love to simplify.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

“Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

“You know, all the evil in the world, all the sadness comes from not having a good answer to that question: What do I do next? You just keep thinking of good things to do, lad. You'll be all right. We'll all be all right. I wanted you to know that.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

“In the silence, nothing was fragmented. There were no separate strands to gather together, to fumble, to complete for attention. In the silence, all of that fell away, and there was only what was here, and what was to be done.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“Topeka meant, "a good place to find potatoes". That made Dorothy laugh. But any place is what you make it said etta. You've got to make it home. You've got to do it for yourself.... It's difficult because everybody wants to be loved and you think you can't find a home unless you are loved by somebody, anybody. But it's not true. Sometimes you can learn to live without being loved. It's terribly hard, but you can do it. The trick is to remember what it's like to be loved.”
― Geoff Ryman, Was

“It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.”
― Geoff Ryman, Was

“This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

“There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it.”
― Geoff Ryman, Was

“Tyranny is a form of perversion. We come to love it. Every government is a tyranny to a degree, and the more evil it is, the more it is loved. The difficulty lies in judging the degree of tyranny under which you live.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“She saw the children. They have been given viruses to educate them. From three weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made adult, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love. They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“He might as well have been talking English, for all Mae understood him.”
― Geoff Ryman, Air

“Everything move...you wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That's how he was built. So we don't know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds. ”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

“Everything goes, everything is lost, eventually. But if something is good, it doesn't matter what happens. The ending is still happy.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“Milena's eyes seemed to go hot and heavy. Praise made her heartsick; she was so unused to it, and needed it so badly.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

“God, the woman must have been a pain. When she was alive.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

“The music comes out of the silence. I don't mind if it goes back in. We come out of the silence...”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden: A Low Comedy

“Once there was a dictator. He drove millions to various kinds of deaths, by war, in prison, or simply in harsh deserts farming their lives away. He destroyed temples, burned books, and ruined the art of calligraphy. He wrote terrible poetry and forced everyone to learn it, so destroying the literary taste of one quarter of humanity. He remained a warrior even as Chairman. He was at his best as a warrior, because as a warrior, he was fighting for his people, dreaming for them. After that, he only ground them down. But I forgive him for saying one beautiful thing:

'Women hold up half the sky.' -- Chairman Mao Tse Tung”
― Geoff Ryman, Air

“She thought she was brave, but she did not have that kind of courage. To face the men who controlled the torturers, the lists, the surveillance, and say: I am going to do the very thing you say I must not do.

And yet they were right.How were things to get better if no one fought?”
― Geoff Ryman, Air

“Heaven is a place where you cannot change and nothing can ever happen, so the things you love are always eternal. Hell is exactly the same.”
― Geoff Ryman, Air

“William has learned in his bones that survival takes the form of other people. They must know you, and for that to happen you must know them. Speak with them, charm them, and remember them.”
― Geoff Ryman, The King's Last Song

“Nice people were not supposed to be able to recognize certain things, because they were supposed to be so untainted that they couldn't even think about them.”
― Geoff Ryman, Was

“Endings don’t mean anything. Meanings lie where the world takes its breath, and that is always now.”
― Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

“Todos queremos encontrar um âncora, todos queremos virar a esquina e ir para casa. Mas a nossa casa foge sempre. A casa deixa-nos. Depois envelhecemos e envelhecemos novamente, ficando ainda mais afastados de casa. De nós próprios. Morremos antes de estarmos mortos, querida. Passamos de rainhas da beleza a velhas carcaças, de crianças traquinas a adultos deprimidos, de moças maduras cheias de amor a mulheres usadas e amargas como bílis. Tudo o que temos é o amor. E nada para amar. Apenas o amor, doloroso, distante e nunca correspondido.”
― Geoff Ryman

“What have you learned Dorothy?" he asked her.

Dorothy thought for a moment and said, "I learned to be disappointed and not to hope too much. I learned how to be beaten and how to beat others. I learned that I am worthless and the world is worthless, and that love is a lie and if it's not a lie, then it's wasted."

"They learned you wrong," he said.”
― Geoff Ryman, Was

“All around them, the people worshipped, on their knees. Worshipped what was good, able to worship what was good by deliberately using it to cover up the bad.”
― Geoff Ryman, Was