Reactionary movements can't sustain themselves unless they find something new to catch and burn on.
Interpretation
Reactionary movements thrive only by identifying new targets for their anger and resentment.
N. K. Jemisin's quote highlights the nature of reactionary movements, which often rely on a constant stream of new grievances or threats to maintain momentum. Without the ability to discover and vilify new enemies or ideas, these movements tend to stagnate or lose their energy, emphasizing how they are fueled more by opposition than by a constructive agenda.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about social movements during a political science lecture.
Magic is the mysteries into which not everyone is so lucky, or unlucky, as to be initiated. It can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language. And it is not. Supposed. To make. Sense. In fact, I think it's coolest when it doesn't.
I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine.
I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history.
There's a thriving field of self-published stuff in, particularly, black fiction. I don't know that other groups of people of color have that same recourse.
Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.
I've always believed that as an artist, as a writer, you need a lot of contact with other people to make your art good.
When people get rich, they cut themselves off from the context that has earned them these riches - the context of the common men. They forget they are part of society.
I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.