Vera Nazarian Quotes:

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.

Topics: Inspirational, Education, Book, Inspiring Book, Inspiring Reading

Have you ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with lack of sleep or hectic with mindless obligations and you about to rush off on an early adventure or business, but full of deep silence and absolute clarity of perception? A dawning which you truly observe, degree by degree. It is the most amazing moment of birth. And more than anything it can spur you to action. Have a burning day.

Topics: Good Morning, Adventure, Sleep, Lack Of Sleep, Hectic

Responsibility and Trust -- these two are like Yin and Yang, together perfectly complete, and each one requiring the presence of the other. The next time you mistrust someone, consider this -- does that person feel responsible for you in any way? If the answer is yes, then go ahead and trust them. Very likely, they are looking out for your best interest.

Topics: Responsibility, Two, Together, Yin And Yang

Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.

Topics: Guilt, Matter, Firsts

Being smart as a whip includes knowing when not to crack it.

Topics: Smart, Knowing, Cracks

Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

Topics: Thinking, Luck, Tickets, Jackpot, Lottery Ticket

If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

Topics: Rocks, Cities, Temples

Withhold a smile only when the smile can hurt someone. Otherwise, let it bloom forth in a riot.

Topics: Smile, Hurt, Hurts Someone, Smiling Faces, Smiley Face

Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey. At other times, it is allowing another to take yours.

Topics: Inspirational, Sexy, Travel

Don't let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.

Topics: Song, Sound, Harmony

The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.

Topics: People, Helping, Remember

Would you like to know your future? If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator. So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.

Topics: Motivational, Thinking, Knowing, Greatest Life

When you wake up from a dream you have only a few precious moments before the details of the dream begin to dissipate and the memory fades. Not all dreams are significant or worth remembering. But the ones that are . . . happen again. So, wait for the dream to return. And never be afraid. Instead, consider it an opportunity to learn something profound and possibly wondrous about yourself.

Topics: Dream, Memories, Opportunity, Opportunities To Learn, Precious Moments

You cannot be fair to others without first being fair to yourself. Know that a well-honed sense of justice is a measure of personal experience, and all experience is a measure of self. Know that the highest expression of justice is mercy. Thus, as the supreme judge in your own court, you must have compassion for yourself. Otherwise, cede your gavel.

Topics: Compassion, Self, Expression, Personal Experiences, Gavel

The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.

Topics: Weed, Garden, Water

Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self. Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.

Topics: Ocean, Self, Water

It's easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.

Topics: Giving Up, Eye, Men

What is it about wearing a tuxedo or that little black dress, that makes us feel confident, beautiful, splendid, even invincible? We put on formal wear and suddenly we become extraordinary. On the days when you feel low and invisible, why not try this on for size: imagine you are wearing a fantastic tailored tuxedo or a stunning formal gown. And then proceed with your day.

Topics: Beautiful, Black, Trying, Formal Wear, Tuxedos

Dangling a carrot in front of a donkey—or anyone else for that matter—is not nice, and not fair, unless you eventually plan to give it up to them.

Topics: Nice, Giving, Matter

The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale...

Topics: Christmas, Holiday, Childhood, Walnuts, Nutcrackers

Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind. Self changes, and you follow.

Topics: Mean, Self, Growth, Changing Your Mind, Self Change

To every rule there is an exception—and an idiot ready to demonstrate it. Don't be the one!

Topics: Idiot, Ready, Exception

In the plains the grass grows tall, since there is no one to cut it. There is no one to water it either.

Topics: Cutting, Water, Grass

The compass rose is nothing but a star with an infinite number of rays pointing in all directions.It is the one true and perfect symbol of the universe.And it is the one most accurate symbol of you.Spread your arms in an embrace, throw your head back, and prepare to receive and send coordinates of being. For, at last you know—you are the navigator, the captain, and the ship.

Topics: Stars, Numbers, Perfect, Pointing, Navigators

When hope is fleeting, stop for a moment and visualize, in a sky of silver, the crescent of a lavender moon. Imagine it -- delicate, slim, precise, like a paper-thin slice from a cabochon jewel. It may not be very useful, but it is beautiful. And sometimes it is enough.

Topics: Beautiful, Moon, Jewels, Lavender, Crescent

Passion and courtesy are two polar opposite traits that serve to balance each other into a full-blooded whole. Without socialization, passion is a crude barbarian, and without passion, the elegant and polite are dead. Allow both passion and courtesy into your life in equal measure, and be complete.

Topics: Passion, Opposites, Two, Socialization, Polar Opposites

Don't be afraid of the dark. Shine!

Topics: Fear, Dark, Shining

Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.

Topics: Mean, People, Missing, Misconstrued

The heartland lies where the heart longs to be. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to find the true place to plant it.

Topics: Lying, Heart, Sometimes

A woman is human. She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man. Likewise, she is never less. Equality is a given. A woman is human.

Topics: Men, Intelligent, Meditation, Gender Equality

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

Topics: Sunset, Sky, Childhood

Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone's home and backyard.

Topics: Travel, Home, Land, Foreign Travel, Foreign Lands

Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

Topics: Clouds, Different, Use

Stick around long enough to be someone's friend. Because true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.

Topics: True Friend, Essence, Long

Not every puzzle is intended to be solved. Some are in place to test your limits. Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all...

Topics: Facts, Tests, Limits

Instructions are never included. They vary with the strength of your ability to see, the measure of your selective blindness, the limits of your mercy, and the intensity of your desire.

Topics: Soulmate, Desire, Limits

When you reach for the stars, you are reaching for the farthest thing out there. When you reach deep into yourself, it is the same thing, but in the opposite direction. If you reach in both directions, you will have spanned the universe.

source: - "The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration: Old Wisdom for a New World". Book by Vera Nazarian, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 15, 2010.

Topics: Success, Stars, Opposites, Reaching For The Stars

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.

Topics: Lying, Games, Differences

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Topics: Memories, Two, Acting

Never look directly at the sun. Instead, look at the sunflower.

Topics: Vision, Sunflower, Looks

A boomerang returns back to the person who throws it. But first, while moving in a circle, it hits its target. So does gossip.

Topics: Moving, Circles, Gossip, Boomerang, Return Back

It is life that fights and struggles and rages; life, that tears at you in its last agonizing throes to hold on, even if but for one futile instant longer... Whereas I, I come softly when it is all done. Pain and death are an ordered sequence, not a parallel pair. So easy to confuse the correlations, not realizing that one does not bring the other.

Topics: Pain, Struggle, Fighting

Love - not dim and blind but so far-seeing that it can glimpse around corners, around bends and twists and illusion; instead of overlooking faults love sees through them to the secret inside.

Topics: True Love, Secret, Glimpse, Overlooking, Around The Bend

No Temple made by mortal human hands can ever compare to the Temple made by the gods themselves. That building of wood and stone that houses us and that many believe conceals the great Secret Temple from prying eyes, somewhere in its heart of hearts, is but a decoy for the masses who need this simple concrete limited thing in their lives. The real Temple is the whole world, and there is nothing as divinely blessed as a blooming growing garden.

Topics: Real, Believe, Blessed, Blooming, Human Hands

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

Topics: Ocean, Skins, Juicy, Ocean Sea, Ocean Water

In the desert, the only god is a well.

Topics: Water, Desert, Wells

Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea. Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink. Is the glass part full or part empty? Take another sip. And now?

Topics: Summer, Ice, Glasses, Delicious, Iced Tea

It does not take a great supernatural heroine or magical hero to save the world.We all save it every day, and we all destroy it -- in our own small ways -- by every choice we make and every tiniest action resulting from that choice.The next time you feel useless and impotent, remember what you are in fact doing in this very moment. And then observe your tiny, seemingly meaningless acts and choices coalesce and cascade together into a powerful positive whole.The world -- if it could -- will thank you for it.And if it does not... well, a true heroine or hero does not require it.

Topics: Powerful, Hero, Choices, Cascade, True Hero

Why is wisdom so fair? Why is beauty so wise? Because all else is temporary, while beauty and wisdom are the only real and constant aspects of truth that can be perceived by human means. And I don't mean the kind of surface beauty that fades with age, or the sort of shallow wisdom that gets lost in platitudes. True beauty grips your gut and squeezes your lungs, and makes you see with utmost clarity exactly what is before you. True wisdom then steps in, to interpret, illuminate, and form a life-altering insight.

Topics: Wise, Real, Mean, True Wisdom, Life Altering

Relief is a great feeling.It's the emotional and physical reward we receive from our bodies upon alleviation of pain, pressure and struggle. A time to bask in the lack of the negative.And yet, think about it—relief is really the status quo, a negation of the suffering, a nothing in itself. It is the way things were before the pressure and struggle began.So, is it a step back? A regression?Or is it an opportunity to regroup, start over, and move in a different direction?Use your moment of relief well.

Topics: Pain, Struggle, Moving, Great Feelings, Regression

A boomerang returns back to the person who throws it.

Topics: Karma, Return, Boomerang

Thoughts are slippery fish in a cold shallow stream.If you are intent on capturing a worthwhile one, you need to stand very still, focus very hard on somewhere outside yourself, and then simply ignore it until it gets so close that it tickles your ankles.Then, pounce.

Topics: Focus, Needs, Ankles

The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing-only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house-not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That's when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.

Topics: Sweet, Wall, Real, Four Walls, Gingerbread

The weight of the world is a trifle, if we all put our two fingers under it and try to lift together.

Topics: Two, Trying, Together, Weight Of The World

Close your eyes and turn your face into the wind. Feel it sweep along your skin in an invisible ocean of exultation. Suddenly, you know you are alive.

Topics: Ocean, Eye, Wind

What is blood but the wine of life?

Topics: Wine, Blood

A wise person is like a smoothly polished rock: it takes time to become either.

Topics: Wise, Rocks, It Takes Time, Polished, Wise Person

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

Topics: Fall, Army, Soldier, Letters Of The Alphabet, Great Army

Strange dreams are better than no dreams at all.

Topics: Dream, Strange, Strange Dreams

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Topics: Ignorant, Mind, Wish, Open Mindedness

The sand in the hourglass runs from one compartment to the other, marking the passage of moments with something constant and tangible.If you watch the flowing sand, you might see time itself riding the granules.Contrary to popular opinion, time is not an old white-haired man, but a laughing child.And time sings.

Topics: Running, Children, Men, Hourglass, Popular Opinion

The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air. It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies.

Topics: New Year, Air, Ice, Winter Days, Beginnings And Endings

For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam's front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters? And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.

Topics: Daughter, Order, Common Sense, Parlor, Dandy

Karma has been a pop culture term for ages. But really, what the heck is it?

Topics: Karma, Age, Culture

Once upon a time, began the story of you.Many perilous, wonderful, harrowing, brilliant, delightful, profound things happened.And yet—the most exciting twists and best turns are yet to come. And it absolutely does not matter how old or young you are.Like a bright carpet of wonders, enjoy the unrolling of your story.

Topics: Profound, Once Upon A Time, Doe

SUN, MOON, AND STARRY SKY Early summer evenings, when the first stars come out, the warm glow of sunset still stains the rim of the western sky. Sometimes, the moon is also visible, a pale white slice, while the sun tarries. Just think -- all the celestial lights are present at the same time! These are moments of wonder -- see them and remember.

Topics: Summer, Stars, Sunset, Starry Sky, Summer Evening

Who says you cannot hold the moon in your hand? Tonight when the stars come out and the moon rises in the velvet sky, look outside your window, then raise your hand and position your fingers around the disk of light. There you go . . . That was easy!

Topics: Stars, Moon, Light, Moon Rise, Aim High

Respect the young and chastise your elders. It's about time the world was set aright.

Topics: World, Young, Elders

Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind. Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things. Their language has been lost. But not the gestures.

Topics: Inspirational, Song, Wind, Olden Days

When tough times come, it is particularly important to offset them with much gentle softness. Be a pillow.

Topics: Tough Times, Important, Gentle, Softness

A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.

Topics: Earthquakes, Shapes, Tornadoes, Natural Disaster

Neither sugar nor salt tastes particularly good by itself. Each is at its best when used to season other things. Love is the same way. Use it to "season" people.

Topics: Love Is, People, Use

Most of us have nicknames-annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true name?It is not necessarily your given name. But it is the one to which you are most eager to respond when called.Ever wonder why?Your true name has the secret power to call you.

Topics: Names, Secret, Annoying, Given Names

A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists. Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.

Topics: Song, Voice, Unity

Love is made up of three unconditional properties in equal measure: 1. Acceptance 2. Understanding 3. Appreciation Remove any one of the three and the triangle falls apart. Which, by the way, is something highly inadvisable. Think about it — do you really want to live in a world of only two dimensions? So, for the love of a triangle, please keep love whole.

Topics: Appreciation, Fall, Acceptance, Three Dimensions, Unconditional Acceptance

An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that’s out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.

Topics: Believe, Reality, Track

If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options. You can climb it and cross to the other side. You can go around it. You can dig under it. You can fly over it. You can blow it up. You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there. You can turn around and go back the way you came. Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.

Topics: Inspirational, Home, Blow, Climbing Mountains Inspirational, Climbing Up

A fine glass vase goes from treasure to trash, the moment it is broken. Fortunately, something else happens to you and me. Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.

Topics: Self Esteem, Recovery, Glasses

It is interesting that we call something good a “dream,” but being called a “dreamer” is somewhat of a putdown. Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world. If you are a secret dreamer, it’s your time to announce yourself.

Topics: Dream, Reality, Interesting

All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.

source: - Vera Nazarian (2004). “Dreams of the Compass Rose”, p.174, Wildside Press LLC

Topics: Responsibility, Knowing, Stories

We often engage the defense mechanism of tunnel vision, just to keep ourselves focused on our daily lives. This makes us terribly jaded in our perception of what is really around us.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Tunnels, Perception, Vision, Defense Mechanisms, Tunnel Vision

Short stories are like individual jewel stones on a necklace, wonderful in themselves like standalone gleaming entities of semantic intensity.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Jewels, Stories, Necklaces

I am happy. I have something to accomplish, create, and achieve. I am happy.

Topics: Achieve, Accomplish

Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor. Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something. But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.

Topics: Creativity, Creative, Elements

In some of my works I take away other elements of the world - normalcy, sex drive, sense of time, memory, a loved one. Without some of these basics, characters have no choice but to do something to reclaim their lives.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Sex, Memories, Character, Sex Drive

My advice for aspiring writers is threefold.First, read as much as possible, both within and outside the genre you arem working in. By reading you hone your internal ear for style. Second, write. Everything comes down to it; unless you write, you are not a writer. Third, submit your work. But - stop chasing every seductive new market out there, and stop trying to write for the tastes of specific established professional markets and editors. That way lies mediocrity and eventual dissolution of your true voice, no matter how embryonic or pronounced it may be now.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Lying, Reading, Writing, Aspiring Writers

Some people prefer eating dessert to the main course. These people have never been really hungry.

Topics: People, Dessert, Eating, Main Course

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.

source: - Vera Nazarian (2002). “Dreams of the Compass Rose”, p.193, Wildside Press LLC

Topics: Memories, Two, Stories

In the kingdom of glass everything is transparent, and there is no place to hide a dark heart.

source: - "The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration: Old Wisdom for a New World". Book by Vera Nazarian, 2010.

Topics: Honesty, Heart, Dark, Transparent

Patience is not a virtue. It is an achievement.

Topics: Patience, Achievement, Virtue

Here's a funny question:What is your favorite word?Think about it—maybe it's a word that makes you absolutely happy, or a word that sounds gloriously beautiful, or a word that evokes awe and wonder. Maybe you are reminded of a great time when you hear it, or maybe it represents your life's dream.So, what is it? What is your favorite word of all words?Thought about it yet?Good.And now, think why.

Topics: Beautiful, Dream, Thinking, Awe And Wonder, Favorite Words

Once upon a time, the Reindeer took a running leap and jumped over the Northern Lights. But he jumped too low, and the long fur of his beautiful flowing tail got singed by the rainbow fires of the aurora. To this day the reindeer has no tail to speak of. But he is too busy pulling the Important Sleigh to notice what is lost. And he certainly doesn’t complain. What's your excuse?

Topics: Beautiful, Christmas, Running, Aurora, Reindeer

Worry is the secret weapon perpetrated upon us by the dark forces of the world that lurk in the shape of fear, uncertainty, confusion, and loss. We, on the other hand, have our own secret weapon against these incorporeal fiends. It is laughter.

Topics: Laughter, Loss, Dark, Dark Forces

I think fantasy literature is the one true literature of hope and imagination.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Thinking, Imagination, Literature

I'll tell you a secret. Old storytellers never die. They disappear into their own story.

Topics: Secret, Stories, Disappear

What we need in fantasy is the sudden balm of clarity - a temporary reprieve from life's white noise and clamor of pain, a kind of time-out. Such clarity, a new perspective, is made possible by fantastic metaphor.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Pain, White, Perspective, White Noise, Reprieve

Snowflakes swirl down gently in the deep blue haze beyond the window. The outside world is a dream. Inside, the fireplace is brightly lit, and the Yule log crackles with orange and crimson sparks. There’s a steaming mug in your hands, warming your fingers. There’s a friend seated across from you in the cozy chair, warming your heart. There is mystery unfolding.

Topics: Christmas, Dream, Healing, Fireplaces, Swirls

Frost grows on the window glass, forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry. Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition. Now it can build castles and cities and whole ice continents with your breath’s vapor. In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in . . . But first, you hear the crackle of their wings.

Topics: Moving, Winter, Glasses

Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean. But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met. To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction from the meeting point. And the two countries are still at war.

Topics: Country, War, Ocean, Half Way, Two Countries

Is it folly to believe in something that is intangible? After all, some of the greatest intangibles are Love, Hope, and Wonder. Another is Deity. The choice to be a fool is yours.

Topics: Believe, Choices, Fool, Hope Love, Intangible

Desire is like fog on a bathroom mirror -- its presence incites you to wipe the mirror, and see yourself clearly again.

Topics: Mirrors, Fog, Desire

I've just been bitten on the neck by a vampire... mosquito. Does that mean that when the night comes I will rise and be annoying?

Topics: Mean, Night, Vampire

Q: Why do I love thee, O Night? A: Because you know I will never answer.

Topics: Night, Answers, Quiet

Why does every road eventually narrow into a point at the horizon? Because that's where the point lies.

Topics: Lying, Doe, Horizon

Freedom is not a license to act but a license to exercise free choices in any given situation.

Topics: Exercise, Choices, Given, Free Choice

For as long as there's anyone to ask 'Why?' the answer will always be, 'Why not?

Topics: Long, Why Not, Answers

My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Writing, Character, Loss, Thematic

If you ask me now, I think every single writer whose work I've read has had some influence upon me, and I continue to be influenced, subtly, by everything I read, like a sponge. But then, what writers aren't? Being a literary sponge is one of the prerequisites for this insanity.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Thinking, Insanity, Influence

The act of sharing with readers was at first too much of an intimate thing. But it evolved into an intense necessity to share.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Too Much, Firsts, Intense

Everything I write now might have roots in myths, often disguised,often dissolved into new multi-ethnic myths of my own making.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Writing, Roots, Might

My brand of fantasy is completely devoid of the traditional notions of magic as ritual. Instead I see the fantastic as a meta-layer of existence beyond the real world.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Real, Magic, World

I love to fool my readers, but in a good way. If you've read any of my work, there's a good chance that at some point I surprised you.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Way, Fool, Chance, Good Chance

Consolation has been wrongly reviled. Consolation is not apathy or inaction. It is not closing one's eyes to the evils of the world. Rather, consolation is the first step in regaining personal equilibrium and strength, which necessarily precedes the ability to act.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Eye, Evil, Apathy

I think I became [writer] despite myself - tricking myself into it, really.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Thinking, Despite

I sat down and wrote a short story in two weeks and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. And Marion bought "Wound On The Moon" .My first sale and my first pro sale rolled into one.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Moon, Two, Stories

The desert is an ideal illusion of a blank slate - so much mystery in endless layers is hidden underneath its bright, pseudo-sterile surface.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Desert, Layers, Pseudo, Blank Slates

One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that I seem to be fascinated as a writer with the notion that we already have all that we need.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Years, Needs, Notion

No waving of enchanted wands but heightened perception. No magic objects, but a transformed and enhanced reality. No spells or chants, but the raw power of the human will to enact supernatural change upon the universal fabric. This is the kind of "magic" that fills Lords of Rainbow - elemental, organic, humanistic - an extension of reality.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Reality, Rainbow, Magic, Wands

Marion Zimmer Bradley took apart my first submission to her, covered the manuscript in red ink revisions, and told me to try her again. I had never been so reeling with authorial joy as I had been that day, holding Marion's letter and seeing that ravaged manuscript - finally, it meant that someone cared!

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Joy, Trying, Ink

Here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Strong, Details, Attention

True balm [of fantasy] takes away the painful irritation of life and simply heals, allowing one to begin anew. And that is what fantasy can do for us.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Irritation, Fantasy, Painful

In Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with - a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Book, Color, Rainbow

Clad in metaphor, the world becomes newborn to our senses, like a phoenix. It is the most effective fresh presentation of the elements of our life for our jaded, numbed, even ailing sense of imagination.

source: - Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

Topics: Phoenix, Imagination, Elements

I am sure that inspiration will strike multiple times - it always does.

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Topics: Inspiration, Doe, Strikes

Of course at that point I had no idea that the adventure was only beginning and that the struggle and the rejections were to pile before me, a typical young writer, in an implacable mountain. But I was on my way.

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Topics: Struggle, Adventure, Ideas, Young Writers

Fantasy, at its best, is balm for the soul. But it is faulty logic to assume that balm is necessarily mind-numbing anesthesia.

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Topics: Soul, Mind, Anesthesia, Numbing

I relished the sweet sense of keeping a unique secret in my mind - a wonderful magical universe that I could go to any time, any place, and no one had to know. It was my personal place, better than any I've read about in any other book. And when I wrote, I was in the process of pulling that personal universe out of nothing and into the cold reality of the greater world.

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Topics: Sweet, Book, Unique

A related recurring theme is the exploration of how we take for granted the things in our immediate environment that are common and ordinary. Existential blindness, of sorts.

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Topics: Ordinary, Common, Existential, Recurring Themes

The only way to help your unique literary voice grow and eventually sing like a glorious creature of wonder is to write what you excites you into a creative passion and brings you pure unadulterated joy.

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Topics: Passion, Writing, Unique, Creative Passion

In the desert, water gives life, while in the ocean an island stands to give anchor. Opposites are desirable and necessary. Once again, you see the theme of taking away a precious element of the world or making it rare and precarious.

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Topics: Ocean, Islands, Anchors

And it is a quiet terrible thing, too, to discover the value of love this way [after loss] - when the object of love is no longer there, when love dies or goes away or changes. When it is too late.

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Topics: Loss, Love Is, Too Late, Value Of Love

I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

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Topics: Greek, Sand, Mark, Charlotte, Lev Tolstoy

Because without such a reprieve we cannot pause and regroup and with the newfound strength go on to initiate that very change which is sorely needed by all.

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Topics: Goes On, Needed, Reprieve

The pyramid shape is said to hold many secrets and amazing properties. One of them is a sense of wonder.

Topics: Pyramids, Secret, Shapes

When I was a little kid back in Moscow, Russia, I've always thought I would become an artist or a folk dancer or an astronomer. In fact, if you'd asked me then about a life of solitary writing I would have said, "Oh how boring! Imagine, to sit at a desk all day and just write."

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Topics: Writing, Kids, Artist

I usually focus on the whole group of characters in any given work-in-progress, and as a result they become particularly dear to me as I delve into their innermost motivations and live out their lives.

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Topics: Motivation, Character, Focus

Every story needs to be worth telling.

Topics: Needs, Stories

Incidentally, the world is magical. Magic is simply what's off our human scale... at the moment.

Topics: Magic, World, Moments

When reviewing my novel Dreams of the Compass Rose for the Magazine of F&SF, master fantasist Charles de Lint called it "engaging and resonant, creating a new mythology that feels so right one might be forgiven for thinking that it's the cultural heritage of some forgotten country or people that have been lost to history." This of course I take as the highest compliment, since it was indeed my sincere intent.

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Topics: Dream, Country, Thinking, Cultural Heritage

Money is like fire. It is only good when there's just the right amount of it, when it's properly contained and under your control.

Topics: Fire, Amount

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.

Topics: Dust, Desert, Arizona

Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels. If you stand back far enough it looks good. Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original. Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope. And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth.

Topics: Color, Law, Justice, Approximation, Pixels

Yawns are not the only infectious things out there besides germs. Giggles can spread from person to person. So can blushing. But maybe the most powerful infectious thing is the act of speaking the truth.

Topics: Inspirational, Powerful, Germs

One sin seldom mentioned is that of killing time.

Topics: Sin, Killing, Time To Kill

Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time -- 'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!

Topics: Blessing, May, Towns

A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?

Topics: Dumb, Ancient, Blind, Classical Composers

One true king knew when to step aside and give up the reins of power—to remove his crown and relinquish his kingdom—all for the sake of glimpsing, just once in a lifetime, the face of a holy child. He was the Fourth to follow the Star. His gift was a secret. The rest of his journey is unknown.

Topics: Kings, Stars, Children

Ice is most welcome in a cold drink on a hot day. But in the heart of winter, you want a warm hot mug with your favorite soothing brew to keep the chill away. When you don’t have anything warm at hand, even a memory can be a small substitute. Remember a searing look of intimate eyes. Receive the inner fire.

Topics: Memories, Eye, Heart, Mug, Hot Days

There is only Love -- and Stories. All else is but a shadow dream.

Topics: Dream, Shadow, Stories

Wisdom is nothing more than the marriage of intelligence and compassion. And, as with all good unions, it takes much experience and time to reach its widest potential. Have you introduced your intellect to your compassion yet? Be careful; lately, intellect has taken to eating in front of the TV and compassion has taken in too many cats.

Topics: Taken, Cat, Compassion

I've always been creative verbally, had a flair, my teachers said - wrote great expository essays in elementary school, scribbled little poems, embraced all writing assignments. And all along I read voraciously - first in Russian and then, after we left the USSR, in English, and even Spanish.

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Topics: Teacher, Writing, School, Flair, Ussr

I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.

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Topics: Artist, Two, Creative

Even for the people who are color-blind to any degree, I believe their experience would also be affected [ in Lords of Rainbow ] if everyone else too only perceived the world in colorless monochrome.

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Topics: Believe, Color, People, Monochrome, Colorless

Our world is so bursting-full of natural wonder that we are all experiencing a sensory overload. We are no longer perceiving all of Ú the details, just the ones that immediately interest us.

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Topics: Our World, Details, Natural Wonders

Seems to me that there is no better way to experience the depth of loss than after the fact. No more powerful instrument of imbuing value in an object than parting with it.

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Topics: Powerful, Loss, Depth

I must admit that I do have a particular soft spot for the character of the chameleon-trickster goddess Ris in Dreams of the Compass Rose. Ris has gone through the whole spectrum of personal change and has had the longest road of all. And in the end she chooses to come back to the world, to guide, and to help, and to open the eyes of those who are suffering. In that is her true strength and humorous wisdom. I really do like her a whole lot.

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Topics: Dream, Humorous, Character, Personal Change, True Strength

The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.

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Topics: Character, Play, Long, Long Deep, Imaginary World

I am a novelist at heart.

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Topics: Heart, Novelists

However I will never forget what Marion [Zimmer Bradley] did for me by accepting that first story from a stupid enthusiastic kid.

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Topics: Stupid, Kids, Stories

At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative [John Ronald Reuel ] Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?".

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Topics: Notebook, Reading, School, Leopard Print

I started to write. And I wrote and wrote all through high school.

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Topics: Writing, School, High School

I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.

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Topics: Oasis, Roots, East

We don't need fantasy to mess with our minds to the point of rendering us insane - real life horrors do that already.

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Topics: Real, Mind, Insane

Thus, true long-term change is brought about not by destructive passion of the moment but by well-reasoned constructive action. Violent shock of Armageddon that leaves nothing in its wake but a blank slate is not a solution, only a postponement of progress.

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Topics: Passion, Long, Progress, Armageddon, Blank Slates

I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Bothallow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.

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Topics: Beautiful, Ocean, Eye

Fantasy is not the literature of subversion of the status quo but of 'awakening to' the status quo.

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Topics: Literature, Awakening, Fantasy

Fantasy plunders the well of our deepest selves for existent truth instead of creating new truths out of the illusory fabric of recent events or the flow of society.

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Topics: Self, Creating, Events, Recent Events

I see no profound progress taking place when there is no hope, no inspiration, only drastic overthrow and rebellion. Before having a revolution of thought there must be real ideals to aspire to, and they are only to be found within.

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Topics: Real, Inspiration, Profound, Drastic

Some writers whom I respect very much, like China Miéville and some others of the New Weird, consider the true role of fantasy to be not Tolkienesque consolation but subversion - a kind of rebe Ûllion from complacency. Yes, I can see what is meant here. And I also see the need to change, to fix, to drastically improve the human lot.

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Topics: Yes I Can, Needs, Roles

A made-up proverb from Dreams of the Compass Rose says, "In the desert, the only god is a well." I love exploring the intensity of such juxtaposition, the dangerous edge.

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Topics: Dream, Rose, Desert

I was nurtured on Greek Mythology and the classical epics. I lived and breathed Homer. Other mythologies - the Russian, the Norse, the Persian, the Indian, Egyptian, etc. - all came later. First and foremost were the Greeks, and they were all living in my head as though I were Zeus and they were a clamoring Chorus of Athenas.

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Topics: Epic, Greek, Firsts, Egyptian, Athena

It is right here, all of it, here for the taking, right before our eyes - happiness, fulfillment, hope, peace, justice. And most of all, there is truth, ordinary and simple, just sitting there to be plucked, if only we get our lazy rear ends off the pillow of complacency. But first, we need to open our eyes to this banal fact. And for that we need a periodic bit of shakeup in the form of an infusion of wonder - fantastic literature.

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Topics: Eye, Simple, Justice, Infusion