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Fantasy Fiction Quotes

Browse 371 quotes about Fantasy Fiction.

Fantasy Fiction Quotes

“ When St. Kari of the Blade Met Luke Skywalker, Star Wars Jedi Knight  “What’s that?” Kari asked pointing to the silvery object attached to Luke’s waist. “It’s my lightsaber,” Luke said cautiously, not knowing where this was going. “It’s like your sword, only many years advanced.” “I see me thinks,” grinned Kari, “although I cannot see how such a short object labors as a sword. Can you show me how? Here, block my blade.” Kari pull-whipped her sharp, simple straight edge fast and held it so that its steel shaft was stationed off Lukes left shoulder. “I don’t want to ruin your sword,” Luke said with a slight grinning shrug. “It will cut your blade in half.” “No it shan’t. C’mon and try” quipped Kari, her violet-grey eyes dancing with mirth. Luke felt compelled just a little bit to teach the seemingly uncomplicated girl a lesson in advanced blade-play. He struck at her sword, but to his amazement, the laser did not cut through Kari’s antiquated, plain cross-hilt weapon, as it easily should have. She wryed and smiled. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Luke said eyes widening in surprise. “The only thing that resists a lightsaber cut is Cortosis.” “Let me try cutting at you,” Kari said, her gridelin eyes glittering in delight. As she struck Luke’s sword, the neat humming cylindrical beam of laser light that was Luke’s blade fell as one solid piece to the ground and began to eat itself inward and disappear, both ends vaporizing and fizzling, meeting in the middle and ending with a loud “pop!” “How did you do that?” Skywalker asked in amazement. “What’s your sword made of?” Kari smiled. “My sword is made of adamantine eternal belief. It both cut and resisted your blade because I shalled it to. I am she. All swordplay in the ’Halla exists on the edge of belief, something you will have to learn if you are to survive here whilst your sky-ship is being refitted and rigged out. Learn about the ’Halla, Luke.” Luke awkwardly grimaced. His lightsaber was an amazing piece of advanced technology and here this wispy backwater of a fencing lass had just “out-believed” him, making his well-ahead art of laser swordplay more primitive than the girl’s unadorned straightedge. He remembered Yoda’s words on failure and belief and felt stupid. The word Jedi was not in Kari’s vocabulary, Luke thought, but notwithstanding, she seemed more than a Jedi than he.”

“Yes, Lilian Earton was a large woman. She was fat. There was no other word for it. But at the same time, there was something indefinable about her. Was it an inner light? A sparkle in her eyes? The way she spoke and moved and made things move around her? The man couldn’t have said exactly. He didn’t know the word “charisma,” but that was exactly what she had. She had personality that no layers of fat could hide. She was impressive.”

“There were just four things a woman could be (five at most): daughter, wife, mother, widow, and slut. That was it. There were no other roles for them—no free and independent women, no feminism, no selfsufficiency. If you didn’t like it, you could be branded a witch and executed.”

“As the days wore on, there was less and less of Aliya left in her. She couldn’t remember what Alex’s eyes had looked like, or how her father laughed at off-color jokes, or what the head of surgery said to her the first time she walked into the operating room. It was all gone. Her new reality was the castle, Earton, and these strange people that she had to build a life with.”

“When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge. The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.”