If you’re a bibliophile, you no doubt have favorite quotes you return to again and again. Underlined, highlighted, or copied into a journal, we all have bits of wisdom from our favorite scribes that have affected us in some way. Some lines you read repeatedly to savor its beauty, or maybe its eternal truth.

So, for this week’s blog post, I thought I’d go through five quotes from some of my favorite speculative authors for you to enjoy. There are so many, it was hard to narrow down, but this is a start!

Loneliness

“Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible.” -Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Any time I revisit favorite quotes by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick, I always come back to this quote. PKD literally throws you into this empty world, this empty apartment building, devoid of most life, as many humans have emigrated off earth. The silence becomes a character of its own in this paragraph, rising up, unleashing, oozing, meshing, and emerging from everything surrounding the character Isidore in his solitary life. And PKD makes us feel this aching silence too. The silence is violent, greedy, and taking over the entire world without apology. Loneliness can have the same greed, and if we let it, it can consume us.

Love

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

One of my favorite sci-fi books, this novel is full of quotable wisdom from the incomparable Le Guin. But this one always stood out to me because this is what being in a relationship is, especially marriage. A relationship or marriage is a constantly changing entity; it must be worked at like anything else. Complacency equals death. 

I love how Le Guin likens love to something like bread, that must be made and remade all the time. Every day is different; we grow as people, as thus, our relationships change as a result. Like a baker, couples need to get their hands dirty, working and remaking their love daily, keeping it fresh and new.

Motherhood

“In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.” -N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Like Le Guin, Jemisin is another goddess I have been inspired by since I read her debut novel. Years later, she’s still one of my favorite, must-read authors. As a child, we revere our mothers like goddesses: they have the power of life and death in their ever-changing bodies; they can be a tender, loving giver, or the rueful punisher. But either way, we honor and love her all the same. 

Our children view us as mothers the same way, especially when they’re young. Their fear and awe of us diminishes over time it seems, but as long as our children walk the earth, we can still be goddesses in their eyes.

Mental Health

“That scared me more than anything, sometimes; the noise of my thoughts, the sense that even the space inside myself wasn't safe.” -Emma Newman, Planetfall

One of my favorite modern sci-fi novels of all time also contains dozens of highlightable quotes I keep coming back to again and again. I loved this book so much because, as someone with mental illness, I felt seen. Represented. Getting into the mind of protagonist Ren was like diving into my own mind, as she also suffers from nearly crippling anxiety, making her question every decision she makes. 

When we need to be alone, to escape we want to withdraw into the comfort of ourselves. But what if that space is uncomfortable, fraught with doubts, fears, and endless what-ifs that keep us up at night? Our own minds become our enemy, as Newman so masterfully reiterates throughout this exceptional novel.

Grief

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

This has been an enormously popular quote, especially over the last couple of years. With the pandemic, climate change, and social and political unrest the world over, we all question why we have to be alive through such a turbulent era. 

Living through multiple wars himself, Tolkien knew what it was like to live through apocalyptic times. We can’t change the times we live through, but we can make the most of the time we have. Relish the little things; be grateful for each day we breathe. Because sometimes, that’s the only silver lining we have in seemingly eternal stormy skies.

Writers have a way of capturing the pulse of humanity, reflecting our own faces back to us in a way we never imagined. Keep reading, and keep the highlighters handy to illuminate those endless pearls of wisdom!

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