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Roommate

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Sarina Bowen

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“I still feel that most F/SF is aimed at people who refuse to grow up. This is ironical because the proportion of genre readers who refuse to grow up has actually gone down a little since I made those criticisms. (I should remind people that I was by no means the first to make them.) What locks the field into juvenility these days is not writer/reader feedback: it's the intense determination of corporate publishers to maintain an audience of extended adolescents. People who don't grow up properly buy more things, especially hacky-slashy faery Game Boy virtual world-building sorts of things.”

FantasyGrowing UpCorporateGrow UpSfAdolescents
Author:M. John Harrison
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“Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.”

PoetryKindnessSorrow
Book:Words under the words: selected poems
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“I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents' definition of me. They had defined me early on, coined me like a word they have translated on some mysterious hieroglyph, and I had spent my life coming to terms with that specious coinage. My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time, and because there was something essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil child.”

LoveGrowing UpParentsSelf Identity
Book:The Prince of Tides
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“He turned to Mrs. Liu. "My dear Sister, don't underestimate this little fellow. He might turn out to be a general one day!" "A general?" Mrs. Liu snorted. "In this world you're doing all right if you don't starve. I couldn't care less whether or not he becomes a high-ranking official." "What do you want to be when you grow up boy?" Lai Ming-sheng asked Liu Ying. "Commander in Chief of the Army!" Nose in the air, Liu Ying answered in all seriousness.”

Growing UpMilitaryStarving
Book:Taipei People
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“Ma già, per lei, la scintilla del desiderio si era spenta, lasciandola stupita, calma e fredda; quei baci, quell’ebbrezza, quella parvenza di amore, tutto ciò che le era tanto piaciuto assumeva di colpo ai suoi occhi una colorazione sordida, appariva una povera cosa, priva di azzardo e di grandezza, un gioco alquanto spregevole, insomma, che poteva ancora stuzzicare i sensi, ma sotto sotto, furtivamente, e proprio per questo perdeva il suo potere.”

LifeGrowing UpAdulthoodWomanhoodFeelings Of Love
Book:Due
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“They had reached the top of a hill. Drogo turned back to look at the city against the light. Plumes of smoke were rising from roofs. He saw his own house in the distance. He identified the window of his room. It was probably open; the women were tidying up. They would strip the bed, put things away in the closet, then bolt the shutters. For months and months no one would enter, except for the patient dust and on sunny days faint streaks of light. There, shut up in darkness, would lie the little world of his boyhood. His mother would preserve it so that on his return he would find everything the same, enabling him to remain a boy in that room, even after his long absence. She was no doubt deluding herself; she believed she could preserve intact a happiness that had vanished forever, holding back the flight of time, so that when doors and windows were reopened at her son's return, things would revert to the way they were before.”

Growing UpPreservationTime FliesLeaving HomeEmpty Nest
Book:Il deserto dei Tartari
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