Holly Lisle > Quotes

“Adventures are only interesting once you've lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt.”
― Holly Lisle, The Silver Door

“I have never yet figured out what to do about good advice that you get, and that you know right away would help you, but that you cannot follow.”
― Holly Lisle, The Silver Door

“Guilt is a good friend, isn't it? It will stand at your back when every other friend has abandoned you, and in the face of all reason it will stay by your side, and even when you tell it, "I am moving on now," it will say, "I shall never leave you; never."
If only I could find a lover as faithful as guilt.”
― Holly Lisle, Talyn

“I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.”
― Holly Lisle, The Silver Door

“Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.”
― Holly Lisle

“Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great...

...and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.

THAT is why you write fiction.”
― Holly Lisle

“A voice speaks to each of us in the still silent places - a voice that tells us to stand, to have courage, to do what is right.”
― Holly Lisle, Diplomacy of Wolves

“How did you do it?" he wanted to know. "Enchanted arrows? Spell of exploding flesh? Rain of fire? No, not that. The worm would be cooked and we would be eating it. Wand of destruction? Oh, a wand of destruction would be a find, fine thing." He turned to me. "Speak up, girl."
I hit him with your skillet. A lot.”
― Holly Lisle, The Ruby Key

“If you have dreams you want to pursue, the time is now. There is no perfect time, and there is no better time. There is only the time you lose while you're making excuses.”
― Holly Lisle, Gods Old and Dark

“May we see our paths clearly, may we follow them truly, and may the roads we walk always bring us back together safely from wherever we have wandered, to wherever we dare call home.”
― Holly Lisle, The Ruby Key

“Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.”
― Holly Lisle, Diplomacy of Wolves

“Race doesn't exist.

Skin color exists. Hair and eye color are real. Body type varies from individual to individual, as does tooth shape and color, the form of fingernails, and the amount and texture of body hair. But 'race' is a phantom conjured up by people no different from each other than purebred Cocker spaniels are. Race is a lie, and the people who conjure by it, no matter their color or their politics, are liars.”
― Holly Lisle, Hunting the Corrigan's Blood

“If you have dreams you want to pursue, the time to pursue them is now. There is no perfect time, and there is no better time. There is only the time you lose while you're making excuses.”
― Holly Lisle

“I would rather be right and die than be wrong and kill.”
― Holly Lisle

“And let’s debunk one bit of writer myth while we’re here: Doing a seventeenth revision on a project does not make a writer an artist or move him above the writer hoi polloi any more than dressing entirely in black or wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or big, black drover coats. These are all affectations, and smack of dilettantism. Real writers, and real artists, finish books and move on to the next project.”
― Holly Lisle

“Dan had begun working his way around the room starting at the food wall. "Here's a little wheel to twist" he said, and an instant later, "Genna, it has water in it. Good sweet water. And when you twist the wheel, it stops and starts." And a moment later, "A little room with a privy! But" echoing noises. "Oh," he said, sounding elated, "when you press a handle, water wahses the inside of the privy. You should see this!”
― Holly Lisle, The Ruby Key

“Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.”
― Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire

“History is neither truth nor completeness. It is simply the best story people can string together at the time, out of whatever facts and snippets they might have on hand.”
― Holly Lisle, Vincalis the Agitator

“Which would be at about shoulder height. Apparently, in Pada’s search for her path, the Saints needed to be sure that they had nothing important to say that lay toward either the ceiling or the floor, or she would render them mute.”
― Holly Lisle, Talyn

“Write with joy”
― Holly Lisle

“Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways—and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.”
― Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire

“I’ll dare to love, and dare to fight, so that when I die my life will be a testament to the chances I took, and not to the chances I was afraid to take.”
― Holly Lisle, Gods Old and Dark

“I thought news was despicable. It was publicly-supported gossip, invasion into the lives and sufferings of strangers, and the love of it represented an unconscionable desire to destroy the privacy of people whose lives had been thrown into turmoil.”
― Holly Lisle, Hunting the Corrigan's Blood

“In this moment, in whatever form it comes, lies the only opportunity I will ever have to act, to think, to love. Only this moment, out of every moment I have ever lived, or will ever live, allows me to matter now.”
― Holly Lisle, Warpaint

“Race is a lie, and the people who conjure by it, no matter their color or their politics, are liars.”
― Holly Lisle, Hunting the Corrigan's Blood

“…and she reflected that thirty-five was a lot harder than twenty-five had been. She was pretty sure she was getting smarter, but she figured she was falling apart at the same rate. By the time she was seventy, she ought to be both brilliant and too decrepit to make any use of her hard-won knowledge.”
― Holly Lisle, Memory of Fire

“First, I look at history the way I look at evolution. Some things die out for a good reason, and should be left dead. I put dictatorships and velociraptors in the same category: leave them in the past, where they can serve as frightening object lessons for the present.”
― Holly Lisle, Warpaint

“The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.”
― Holly Lisle

“Every writer has something to say, but those writers whose works endure have dared to say something about the things that frighten them, confuse them, challenge them, and occasionally delight them.”
― Holly Lisle

“It was so beautiful to know that I would go on forever, and so terrible to know that the part of me that fought through the pain of existence as Cadence Drake would never be only Cadence Drake beyond the few brief, flickering instants that my fragile fleshself survived. I would be absorbed into the greater whole and would cease to exist.”
― Holly Lisle, Hunting the Corrigan's Blood