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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal. Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.” —Chinua Achebe”

“When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp... Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.”

“When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”

“When I began my job, my genitor behaved like a true liberal: on the one hand, he was embarrassed by my working as a waiter; on the other hand, he felt politically strengthened in his security. For Cadmo – that is my brother’s name – I am simply the ruler's menial. The old man is a speechifier, the boy a permanent anarchist, albeit only so long as things do not get hot. Degrees of freedom in which one can commit or omit everything are alien to both men.”

“When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

“When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps.”

“When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person... What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking -- whoever "everyone" happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?”

“When I began to talk publicly about the hatred that was in the Talmud, I was branded a hater, a bigot, and an anti-Semite by the media and by groups like the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. The ADL is a multimillion-dollar, worldwide organization whose whole purpose is to defame and discredit those who simply tell the truth about Jewish supremacism and hatred against Gentiles.”

“When I began writing fact-detective stories, I promised myself that I would always remember I was writing about the loss of human beings, that I was to never forget that. I hoped that the work I did might somehow save other victims, might warn them of the danger. I never wanted to become tough, to seek out the sensational and the gory, and I never have. I have joined the Committee of Friends and Families of Missing Persons and Victims of Violent Crimes, at the invitation of the group. I have met many parents of victims, cried with them, and yet I have somehow felt guilty - because I make my living from other people's tragedies. When I told the Committee how I felt, they put their arms around me and said, "No. Keep on writing. Let the public know how it is for us. Let them know how we hurt, and how we try to save other parents' children by working for new legislation that requires mandatory sentencing and the death penalty for killers." They are far stronger than I could ever be.”

“When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.”