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There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

Patricia A. McKillip

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Patricia A. McKillip
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: February 29
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Salem
Oregon
Patricia Anne McKillip
Behinds
Behind
Simple
Words
Language
Thought
Anything
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More quotes by Patricia A. McKillip

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Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter's language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret. Will you let me stay?
Patricia A. McKillip
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Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art.
Patricia A. McKillip
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I don't teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true.
Patricia A. McKillip
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I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle. I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you. When you opened your gates to me, I was home.
Patricia A. McKillip
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All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.
Patricia A. McKillip
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What? It was a good word. Like a rock in a river, sticking up to let you land on it, so you could make your way across the flow.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Men see what they are most afraid of.
Patricia A. McKillip
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The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.
Patricia A. McKillip
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But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Imagination is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't be transformed into food for the imagination.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.
Patricia A. McKillip
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I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.
Patricia A. McKillip
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It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Do you become in visible?' 'No. I'm there, if you know how to look. I stand between the place you look at and the place you see. Behind what you expect to see. If you expect to see me, you do. I listen in places where no one expects me to be.
Patricia A. McKillip
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I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Night is not something to endure until dawn. It is an element, like wind or fire. Darkness is its own kingdom it moves to its own laws, and many living things dwell in it.
Patricia A. McKillip
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Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.
Patricia A. McKillip
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The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.
Patricia A. McKillip
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The man was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there
Patricia A. McKillip