Fantasy Quotes

What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?

~ Terry Pratchett

The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off.There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

~ Terry Pratchett

I am not Cugel the Clever for nothing!

~ Jack Vance

Turns out that once you kill a god, people want to talk to you. Paranormal insurance salesmen with special godslayer term life policies. Charlatan's with godproof armor and extraplanar safe houses for rent. But most notably, other gods...

~ Kevin Hearne

We are in this fairyland on sufferance, it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.

~ G.k. Chesterton

In your life, right here and now, things like mermaids, fairies, witches and monsters are nothing but fairytales told to your grandchildren and stories you heard from your own grandparents as children. They exist only in your imagination. Did you ever think that there is a chance all this was once real, that it all existed? Perhaps yes, but you would then consider such thoughts irrational, that even if you were to believe it and try telling someone they would think you for mad. In my world those creatures are real – I’m real, and I am here to tell you of a story that happened in eons past in the majestic island of Aster. - Queen of Merfolk Asteria - Ninemia

~ Marilena Mexi

I can see the headline now: Archangel Busts Were Whisperer.

~ Stacy Mantle

Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.

~ Tahir Shah

You don’t have to bewitch me, Aiden. I like you already.

~ Lita Burke

Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.

~ Jason Ellis

What I knew for sure was that he had a quick temper, a cocky attitude, and a southern accent... Apparently he also has a pet cougar.

~ Stacy Mantle

The bleached ceilings, walls, and floors gleam in perfection. Drained of color, wiped of contamination, forever untainted they exist; a cold reminder of my purity.

~ Celeste Simone

The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in two directions. Half make a black storm of moving, twisting shapes. The other half forms a white-as-snow moving cloud. The ranks are divided.

~ Laura Kreitzer

I am only a dead Sciomancer, but I must warn you of fire and kisses.

~ Lita Burke

There’s nothing to be scared of, right Akhol?”He said nothing as he stepped toward the rushing water that rolled around a big rock and was swallowed whole by impenetrable darkness.“Right?” Andrew repeated, his voice swallowed by the sound of rushing water.Akhol didn’t respond again. He tapped a foot above the water before he stepped in and disappeared beneath the surface in one fluid motion.

~ Laura Kreitzer

I blinked at him just casually talking about my new sex life with his genie-shiny head, and I knew at any second I would break into hysterics.

~ Laura Kreitzer

A part of me sought the light in all the people I knew, but with the Shadows, it was like bringing them back from a subterfuge comma. Literally tearing the veil of blackness down and showing them the luminescence of light.

~ Laura Kreitzer

We should follow every supply that runs into the particular lake below, going upstream in terms of we can. When we do not find Drakes’ path, or even an additional, we should come back straight along,look yourself upward an additional way to obtain foods,and then do a similar for the next water for the south.

~ Chayada Welljaipet

Roads go ever ever on,Over rock and under tree,By caves where never sun has shone,By streams that never find the sea;Over snow by winter sown,And through the merry flowers of June,Over grass and over stone,And under mountains of the moon.Roads go ever ever onUnder cloud and under star,Yet feet that wandering have goneTurn at last to home afar.Eyes that fire and sword have seenAnd horror in the halls of stoneLook at last on meadows greenAnd trees and hills they long have known

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent? murmured Kohlrabi.Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like epiphany and amaranth. Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers...Mosca shrugged.He's got a way with words.

~ Frances Hardinge

You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.

~ Neil Gaiman

The sun hitched up her trousers and soldiered on up into the sky. September squinted at it and wondered if the sun here was different than the sun in Nebraska. It seemed gentler, more golden, deeper. The shadows it cast seemed more profound. But September could not be sure. When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean that it is brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Without thinking about it at all, Harry stepped in front of Hermione.There was an intake of breath from behind him, and then a moment later Hermione brushed past and stepped in front of him. Run, Harry! she said. Boys shouldn't have to be in danger.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

You won't find the tales I bear in any books . . . My tales are from the Moon Realm.” —Ebb Autumn

~ Richard Due

But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do.Drop dead.Aw, you say the most romantic things.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Back in the leather and lace eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan—punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish.

~ Terri Windling

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.

~ Barbara Hambly

Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.

~ Lev Grossman

That’s when I notice Cheryl and Mickey cuddled up on the couch. She’s leaning on his shoulder, his arm around her, her leg across his lap. Cheryl throws glances at Kerry that say, “Look at me!” while Kerry shoots a “You go, girl!” smirk right back. I think of CK, how he and I often sat like that. Not because we were seconds from making out or wanted to look like a couple, but just out of a deep, platonic connection. My heart hits a higher notch on the ache-o-meter, my teeth sear into my bottom lip, and then something inside me snaps as cleanly as a crayon.

~ Kea Alwang

But— yelped Twizbang, “Greydor will eat us!

~ Richard Due

So I’m figuring this is death. The little air left in the cockpit is toxic with marthenine, and I can only wonder how much of it I have breathed in. Is my throat becoming raw hamburger? My lungs, oatmeal?

~ Kea Alwang

An Enforcer’s style is to destroy all magicians in sight and lap up their essence like a starved cur.

~ Lita Burke

We all know how it says it’s going to end, Dreamer, but no one knows for sure. That’s up to you, and your friends. It is the Four who shall decide whether or not it comes true, not a bunch of words written on a piece of paper. Not even,” he turned the book around so that its insides were facing her, “if it’s written in on very old, very large, dusty paper.

~ Chani Lynn Feener

Answer me immediately or I'll start cutting away everything that's pretty on you...and then put it back.

~ Richard Finney

You retain the Ki. Whether or not you become a warrior is for you to discover.

~ Richard Finney

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

~ Adam Gopnik

Stars are the souls of old sailors. They plot the skies and guide the wayward home.

~ Brian Rathbone

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

~ Joseph Conrad

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.

~ Naomi Wolf

Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvelous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and, the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.

~ H.p. Lovecraft