Fantasy Quotes

So fine a medicine is the will to action.

~ Hope Mirrlees

Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

~ W.b. Yeats

So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.

~ T.s. Eliot

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

~ Charles Baudelaire

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

~ Steve Erickson

The townspeople took the prince for deadWhen he never returned with the dragon’s headWhen with her, he stayedShe thought he’d be too afraidBut he loved her too much instead.

~ Jess C. Scott

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

~ Paul Auster

The surge of his ardour swept through him in climatic release, filling her womb with his final, mortal sowing.

~ Georgina Anne Taylor

They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal souls.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They are faithful, even if we are not.

~ Ashlee Willis

In the absence of faith, our dreams will move from feasible aspirations to implausible fantasy.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The truth is I don’t know what happens to the spirits of the dead when they leave this world. Priests may claim to, even Truthseeker may claim to. However nobody truly knows. All Truthseeker truly knows is that Ishar, Kirfell, Orion and Avanti are lies. He has no proof of an alternative. I don’t know. There may be nothing beyond this dark reality we live in, but that doesn’t feel right to me. We love, we hate, we fight, we strive... People’s lives seem too complex and important to be simply extinguished like a candle.’~Vexis ZaelwarshDeathsworn Arc 5: The Temple of the Mad God

~ Martyn Stanley

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe.God was real, and he hated us.

~ Aaron Dembski-Bowden

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

~ Philip Pullman

Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

~ China Miéville

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

~ Diane Duane

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.

~ Washington Irving

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

~ David Farland

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.

~ Julio Cortázar

I don't write fantasy, I write historical novels about an imaginary place.

~ Raymond E. Feist

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

~ Julio Cortázar

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

~ Charles Baudelaire

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

~ Alberto Manguel

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

~ Marie Brennan

There's something terribly weird about the standard fantasy setting--not least of which the fact the phrase standard fantasy setting can be uttered without irony.

~ Yahtzee Croshaw

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.

~ E.t.a. Hoffmann

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

~ Mirra Ginsburg

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

~ Charles Nodier

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

~ M. John Harrison

The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.

~ Tom Shippey

In every possibility of a mind May you travel, yet not blind. As a head filled with imagination, Goes a heart full of gold creation, It's never late to have a dream. Nor is it so far away as it seems, And, like a rearview mirror reveals, Thus a fantasy soon becomes real. It may be closer than it appears. Or at least it will show up clear. Never give up a dream for fear!

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I believe in the simple things--the classic beginning of once upon a time, that good conquers evil in the end, fantasy and fate. My life is that of wondrous enchantment, a place of endless possibilities and dreams, where inspiration is found in the oddest of places. I aspire to inspire, and someday I will change the world

~ Andrew Kendall

Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you’re in love with the way your characters bleed.

~ F.k. Preston

Where do they go, these dreams of mine? Do they live? Do they die? Do they fall? Do they fly?

~ F.k. Preston

If my life was pulled into the pages of a book, there would be coffee stains and wrinkles along the lines of that narrative. Because all I can wish is that the book of my life would be well read and well loved. Living within words and the sound of writing.

~ F.k. Preston

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

~ Christopher Hitchens