Elizabeth Hand Quotes

I'm an utterly orthodox feminist in the political or social sense: I want equal rights for women, period, and I vote that way. I support social programs that help women and children; I'm pro-choice, in favor of anything that makes it easier for women to raise their kids, with or without men, in conventional or unconventional family units. But do I think the world would be a better place if it were run solely by women? No; not any more than I think a solely patriarchal model is an ideal.

I have to say (regretfully) that I've seen very little in my real life to indicate the presence of either the supernatural or the divine. As for apocalypse, I was imprinted at an early age with the idea of The End of the World (this also courtesy of the Catholic Church). I can remember being terrified of thunderstorms — I'd think, Uh oh, THIS IS IT. I was born in 1957, and grew up in the metropolitan New York area with the Cold War as a backdrop. In kindergarten and first and second grade we had constant air raid drills, sirens going off and that whole "Duck 'n Cover" drill when you cower under your desk or else hide in the classroom cloak closet, waiting for the Atomic Bomb to drop. I had nightmares about that well into my twenties. For a while in the 1970s I lived near a fire station in D.C., and when the fire sirens would go off at night I'd wake up terrified — again — that THIS WAS IT. Of course it never was, but it was good practice at being scared and thinking about scary stuff.

Faeries might have been wandering around in Victorian England. I can believe that. But it is a more difficult thing to think that they might be wandering around Camden Town now. It is more of a jump, but I find that more interesting in many ways. The irruption of the supernatural into our world is a much more enticing notion to explore than the same thing happening in some past time, or in a wholly imaginary world.

Truth is, often Lesley got the fuzzy end of the lollypop.

I think Washington is a magical place. I lived there for thirteen years, and until the day I left I never wanted to live anywhere else. I went back for the first time two years ago, after over a decade's absence; it was like seeing an old lover and discovering — with great relief — that the flame is still there. Gore Vidal famously remarked of walking through the city with his grandfather, a senator, and the old man telling him, "Someday all this will make marvelous ruins."

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn’t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn’t even there.
And that was when I realized: This is what it’s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just the world turning and going on without you and you’ll never be part of it again.

I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.

There's always a moment when everything changes. … If you don't see it coming, if you blink or you're drunk or just looking the other way — well everything changes anyway, it's not like things would have been different. But for the rest of your life you're fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I'd blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I've never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn't a big fucking hole in it.

So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.

I try to maintain a balance between having a vision of the world that many readers do not experience for themselves, trying to give them enough grounding in the world we are all familiar with, so they don't feel that they are completely lost in Faerie.

A lot of the revisionist thinking by feminist mythologisers — people who based their projections of ancient "matristic" cultures on work done by folks like Marija Gimbutas — is based on archaeological and anthropological speculation that in some cases has since been proved wrong. The pretty happy flower children who lived at ancient Knossos, for instance, were the result of wishful thinking by the Victorian explorer Arthur Evans (a man, please note). No one actually knows what these cultures were really like, but it's doubtful that they were free of the same problems of sexual inequality that we have today.

Self-assured?
"I guess. Self-assured and smug, you know? Why is it teenagers are always so fucking smug?"
"Because they share a great secret," Martin said mildly, and took another bite of sprouts.
"Oh yeah? What's that?"
"Their parents are all assholes."

You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique; but you didnt hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through.

I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.

I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing … I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.