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.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
In reality, we haven't escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form.
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