Neo > Neo's Quotes

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Did you know that when someone dies their body weight drops quite suddenly? It is not really noticeable unless you have held them close whilst they are dying, praying to every god that you won’t lose them. It is just a touch. But it’s there when they leave you.
Twenty-one grams. That is the weight of a human soul.”
― Nikita Gill, Your Body is an Ocean: Love and Other Experiments

“Tell your daughters how you love your body.
Tell them how they must love theirs.

Tell them to be proud of every bit of themselves—
from their tiger stripes to the soft flesh of their thighs,
whether there is a little of them or a lot,
whether freckles cover their face or not,
whether their curves are plentiful or slim,
whether their hair is thick, curly, straight, long or short.

Tell them how they inherited
their ancestors, souls in their smiles,
that their eyes carry countries
that breathed life into history,
that the swing of their hips
does not determine their destiny.

Tell them never to listen when bodies are critiqued.
Tell them every woman’s body is beautiful
because every woman’s soul is unique.”
― Nikita Gill, The Girl and the Goddess: Stories and Poems of Divine Wisdom

“They keep saying that beautiful is something a girl needs to be. But honestly? Forget that. Don’t be beautiful. Be angry, be intelligent, be witty, be klutzy, be interesting, be funny, be adventurous, be crazy, be talented - there are an eternity of other things to be other than beautiful. And what is beautiful anyway but a set of letters strung together to make a word? Be your own definition of amazing, always. That is so much more important than anything beautiful, ever.”
― Nikita Gill

“We are the blood
of the witches
you thought were dead.

We carry witchcraft in our bones
whilst magic still sings
inside out heads.

When the witch hunters
imprisoned out ancestors
when they tried to burn the magic away.

Someone should have
warned them
that magic cannot be tamed.

Because you cannot burn away
what has always
been aflame.”
― Nikita Gill

“Persephone, grant me the foresight to know when I must let go my old life to start anew.

Artemis, grant me the strength of your spine when you helped deliver Apollo, your own twin.

Athena, grant me the solidarity in your sinews for which you were born in all of your armour.

Aphrodite, grant me the kind of heart that always follows my passions true.

Andromeda grant me the wish to never fall out of love with the night sky or the glisten of it’s stars.

And Hera, grant me your fury, so I can remind my enemies I am not the weakness they perceive, I am the oncoming storm, I am war.”
― Nikita Gill

“The thing I admire most
about you
is no matter how hard,
or how much the world
has tried to
beat you,
break you,
destroy you,
and throw you to the wolves
you are still here,
turning all your pain
all your suffering
into armor,
into determination,
into weapons
and earning the respect
of that same pack of wolves
that were meant to rip you
limb from limb.”
― Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty

“As leaves cover the forest floor in a carpet of vibrant rusts, orange and gold, autumn proves that sometimes death too can be a beautiful thing.”
― Nikita Gill

“who said you can’t
wear a flower crown
& still remain a
fearsome thing? - make persephone proud. by amanda lovelace”
― Nikita Gill, Dragonhearts

“Fathers, do not let your sons forget

Do not let your sons forget
where their essence was just formed,
when their bodies were most vulnerable,
they were protected by the womb of a woman.

If they ever call all women weak,
remind them of the strength of their mother
who pulled her whole body apart
to give theirs a home.”
― Nikita Gill, Your Soul is a River

“They won't tell you about how Red Riding was the wolf
and Snow White went back to kill the queen.
Or that Cinderella's step family mysteriously
disappeared after she became queen.

They are afraid to let you know that Aurora woke up screaming
because a strange man was kissing her without her consent.
Or how Ariel had no problem killing the two timing prince
and restoring herself to the sea.

The fairy tales we should tell
our daughter should be about strong women with real flaws
and incredible qualities.

Let's raise girls who don't just wait to be rescued,
but take destiny in their own hands
and charge to battle dragons and their enemies.”
― Nikita Gill

“Beauty and Bravery
When I set out to find my father, I was not being brave. I was acting out of fear or losing the only parent I ever had. They may want you to believe I was simple being brave, but anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat.”
― Nikita Gill, Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

“When I was a little girl and my teachers sent notes home complaining
that I was as loud as the boys, that it wasn't lady like for a girl
to be this outspoken, this raucous, instead of forcing me to tone it down
to the timber of a stage whisper, just a few notes above a whimper
you took me by the hand to the hilltop by our house,
told me to use my voice by shouting to my heart's content,
told me never to forget that I was a girl not a mouse
and if I believed I had to change myself to suit anyone else I shouldn't
that no matter what they said my voice was so important.
You then visited my school, called a meeting with my teachers
sat them all down and said that you were raising a rebel girl
to be a warrior woman, and if she could not speak,
the same way boys are allowed to, if she had to turn her voice into sighs
then how will she utter the battle cries that were needed when her warrior sisters
called upon her to help them defend the daughters of this world.”
― Nikita Gill

“How dare you tell me 'I am not like most girls,'
when those 'girls' you refer to
are my sisters and mothers, my friends,
the very solace and the kindness I have sought
when the worst things in my life have happened?

How dare you assume
I should take that as a compliment,
and beam at you like it is praise
when you are alienating me
from the very core
of my proudly female being?

There are a thousand ways
to tell me you love me,
and making my sisters small
to make me big
isn't one of them.

Tell me you love me, but not because I am different.

Tell me you love me, just because you do.”
― Nikita Gill

“So when they ask you what you weigh, you don’t need to look down at any scale. Instead, simply tell them the truth; tell them how you weigh whole universes and storms and scars and stories, too.”
― Nikita Gill, Dragonhearts

“The Coven  

When they break your heart, run to a sister who will stroke your hair and remind you of what you are. When no one else understands, run to a sister who will hold you close and heal you with the kindest words. When the wound is fresh, your sisters are the only ones who know how to enchant away the pain. When a man scares you enough to choke on your own tears, text your sisters and they will hex him into hell for you. This is what covens will do: protect each other from the world, for this is what sisters do.”
― Nikita Gill, Dragonhearts

“There is a beautiful thing inside you
that is thousands of years old.

Too old to be captured in poems.
Too old to be loved by everyone
But loved so very deeply
by a chosen few.”
― Nikita Gill

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Failing and Flying"

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Icarus should have waited for nightfall,
the moon would have never let him go.”
― Nina Mouawad

“What if it were possible or even entertaining, to recreate and transform one of the old myths and infuse it with a different meaning?...Imagine being guided by your mythology that it is better to thrive and prosper, than just to survive.”
― Robert William Case, Daedalus Rising - The True Story of Icarus

“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.”
― Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possess that much hubris, that he dares it to fall?”
― Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Icarus burned because he flew during the day. He wanted the world to see. We fly in the darkness, where people are afraid to look.”
― J.J. McAvoy, American Savages

“Icarus flew too close to the sun, but at least he flew.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Like Achilles, the hero who forgot his heel, or like Icarus who, flying close to the sun, forgot that his wings were made of wax, we should be wary when triumphant ideas seem unassailable, for then there is all the more reason to predict their downfall.”
― Dwight Longenecker, The Romance of Religion: Fighting for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty