Afterword Quotes

“... but to remain historically accurate, I would have had to leave out an important question that I felt needed to be addressed, which is, 'What if Jesus had known kung fu?”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.
However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.

---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss”
― Brian Aldiss, Hothouse

“For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon

“If 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted' stands as a symbol of the license granted to the Ismaili elite, then the unrelated subsidiary motto 'Omnia in numero et mensura' acquires an ultimately cautionary significance. All things within measure, nothing too much.”
― Michael Biggins, Alamut

“[We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“[Viktor E. Frankl] joked that in contrast to Freud's and Adler's "depth psychology," which emphasizes delving into an individual's past and his or her unconscious instincts and desires, he practiced "height psychology," which focuses on a person's future and his or her conscious decisions and actions...His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals.”
― William J. Winslade, Man's Search for Meaning

“I still remember staying up all night to get it done, and I realize that's always the best time to finish a book. The sun is yet to come up. It seems the whole world is asleep, and there you are, on your own, with the pages set before you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that "Lolita" was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses -- the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions -- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; In the story of a Witch, there is no afterword.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“A story that needs to have words said about it, is a story that does not contain all its own right words.

-- Introduction to Varley's "Persistence Of Vision" collection”
― Algis Budrys

“Ross’s style is always beautifully matched to his material – spare, lean, honest, no gimmicks, and yet in its very simplicity setting up continuing echoes of the mind. (Margaret Laurence's Afterword)”
― Sinclair Ross, The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories

“When the line is delivered, Hamlet is gazing on Yorrick's skull, casually unearthed by the gravedigger. Yorrick's fame grew out of being the line which accompanied what is perhaps the single most recognizable iconic image in literature: a man in black, considering a human skull. Show some form of that picture to most moderately educated people and plenty who aren't and they'll know that the man is Hamlet. Such things don't find their way into the popular consciousness by accident and trivial though the line may sound, it speaks to the heart of the play: a man compelled by circumstances outside of his control to confront his own mortality.”
― A.J. Hartley, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

“There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the begining of the industrial age, when in reality did not possess the means for a world in whic the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new sciene and of its application to technique and to production- nevertheless man at the begining of modern development was full of hope. Fourhundred years later when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was fourhundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.

Afterword on George Orwell’s 1984”
― Erich Fromm, 1984

“(…) In a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true.”
― Erich Fromm, 1984