Kij Johnson famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Adventures are what happens when an event is flawed, a mark of imperfection.
-- Kij Johnson

#Adventure #Imperfection #Events
Cats have a sort of game they play when they meet. A player alternates between watching the strange cat and ignoring her, grooming or examining everything around herself - a dead leaf, a cloud - with complete absorption. It is almost accidental how the two cats approach, a sidelong step and then the sitting again. This often ends in a flurry of spitting and slashing claws, too fast to see clearly, and then one or the other (or both) of the cats leap out of range. The game can have one exchange or many - and is not so different from the first meetings of women.
-- Kij Johnson

#Cat #Player #Games
Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.
-- Kij Johnson

#Grieving #Losing #Emotion
Waiting required a future to wait for: a falsehood. I know now that there is only now. I remember things that happened months (or what is years?) ago: old -worn-out nows. The future happens, but it is always shaped from a series of nows.
-- Kij Johnson

#Years #Waiting #Months
I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?
-- Kij Johnson

#Dream #Lonely #Stars
We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.
-- Kij Johnson

#Thread #Robes
Because if something does go wrong, you'll need what you're feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.
-- Kij Johnson

#Feelings #Doe #Needs

Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.
Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.
Your fellow man is your mirror. If your own face is clean, the image you perceive will also be flawless. But should you look upon your fellow man and see a blemish, it is your own imperfection that you are encountering - you are being shown what it is that you must correct within yourself.
It's the imperfections that make something beautiful, that's what makes it different and unique from everything else.
I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.
For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
Authorities arrest me, release me, and then invite me back to host public events. I think it's interesting.
A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.

Kij Johnson famous quotes

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