Quotes

about or by ...
Louky Bersianik | Pat Cadigan | Ursula Le Guin | Vonda McIntyre | Robert Silverberg | James Tiptree, Jr.

Quotes from Louky Bersianik's The Eugelionne

"Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious about paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood."

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929- . Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, 1986 (published in Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1989).

Ursulines: More Le Guin Quotes

"Like other Feminist science fiction authors, [Vonda] McIntyre writes of powerful, competent, courageous female characters who would never wait for a man to rescue them, nor let him be the one to accomplish great deeds."

William Sims Bainbridge, "Women in Science Fiction," Sex Roles October 1982 v. 8 no. 10 p. 1090

"I insist on living in a world where the word 'feminist' is as quaint as the word 'suffragette'."

Pat Cadigan, "The Net" BBC2, 8 June 1994 (submitted by Susan Stepney)

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male . . . And there is, too, that prevailing masculinity about both of them--that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss."

Robert Silverberg, "Who Is Tiptree, What Is He?" in Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree, Jr., (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), pp. xii-xv, xviii.