Tom Shippey Quotes

• 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.

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  Tom Shippey

  Loyalty   Echoes   Filters  

  Tom Shippey (2014). “The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition”, p.304, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  1497

• Many sci-fi authors, we know, are as clever and tricky as so many Coyotes. Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.

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  Tom Shippey

  Clever   Past   Imagination  

  1158

• While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.

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  Tom Shippey

  Persistence   Giving   Luck  

  Tom Shippey (2014). “The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition”, p.183, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  2687

• Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common...to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time.

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  Tom Shippey

  Memories   Reading   Years  

  1728

• Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.

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  Tom Shippey

  Trying   Fiction   Literature  

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