Dave J.

“For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it’s true. Children know that. Adults know it too and that’s precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“With people, so with trees

With people, so with trees: where there are groups
Of either, men or trees, some will remain
Aloof while others cluster where one stoops
To breathe some dusky secret. Some complain

And some gesticulate and some are blind;
Some toss their heads above green towns; some freeze
For lack of love in copses of mankind;
Some laugh; some mourn; with people, so with trees.”
― Mervyn Peake, Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings

“Of course I didn't read James and sit down and say, Now I'll write a story about that “lost soul.” It seldom works that simply.

I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word “Omelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don't you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas... Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas. Homme helas.

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction