Jay Lake > Quotes

“Writing is self-reinforcing. Don't make a fetish out of it, and don't surrender to the myth of the garret, or the myth of the chained muse. It's like playing the guitar, or practicing taekwondo, or having sex. The more you do, the better you get. The better you get, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you want to do.”
― Jay Lake

“The fanged shadows boiled out behind them, howling for blood, their voices creaking with the sound of snapping bones. The fallen of Hethor's own party seemed to be swept up in the pursuit, dead correct people on their trail, keening, crying, blaming. Rivers of red flowed rapidly across the stone dock in the twilight, slippery sticky blood overtaking their flight to make them trip and slide headfirst into stone bollards or pitch screaming into the sea.”
― Jay Lake, Mainspring

“Do not teach your congregation to pray.
Someday they might succeed.”
― Jay Lake, Kalimpura

“We are not dead!"
He could hear the smile, even in her answering yell. "Certainly we are. It is only that our bodies have not yet learned the truth.”
― Jay Lake, Mainspring

“We each pace against the bars that cage us."

"Your cage is the world," I said in frustration, though I did not mean to strike for his heart.

"Everyone's cage is the world. Some worlds are smaller than others.”
― Jay Lake, Green

“Ever has common decency paved the way to uncommon folly.”
― Jay Lake, The Stars Do Not Lie

“Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.”
― Jay Lake, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 100, January 2015

“I wished I’d thought of that last before I’d departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites.”
― Jay Lake, Kalimpura

“Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs.”
― Jay Lake, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

“The voice of dream called me on, the voice of love bade me stay. The voice of reason screamed somewhere deep inside me.”
― Jay Lake, Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

“Building a temple atop a minehead, when the local tulpas haunted the dangerous galleries and tunnels of Below, had not been the wisest judgment ever made. I tried to remember if this had been my idea. Somehow I had the feeling that it was.”
― Jay Lake, Endurance

“It had always irked me that gods never said, “Next Tuesday, Rajit will be struck with boils in his mouth and choke to death.” What good was prophecy if you had to live through the events foretold before you could begin to understand them?”
― Jay Lake, Kalimpura

“A goddess is the sum of all her believers, all the prayers and hopes and curses and despair ever uttered in her name.”
― Jay Lake, Green

“People's lives and deaths are written in polite notes that must be passed among the powerful like dance cards.”
― Jay Lake, Green

“The plan was to create a agrarian buffer between the rapidly enveloping towers of New York and Brooklyn.”
― Jay Lake, The Steampunk Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories

“Most people never choose anything. They are chosen for, or they follow what is left to them after their choices have been eaten away by time, by ill fortune, by their own actions or the deeds of others.”
― Jay Lake, Green

“Just don’t ask questions.” Chillicothe mimed a pistol with the fingers of her left hand. “Some answers are permanent fatal errors.”
― Jay Lake, Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

“Is it a manly game," he asked, for while men are ruled by their loins, those loins have two small brains each no larger than an olive and thus do not think well.”
― Jay Lake, Green

“We each carry a measure of grace, and we each carry a measure of evil. There is never enough grace to banish the evil, and there is never enough evil to smother the grace.”
― Jay Lake, Green