Pamela Dean

“Truthfully, the person with whom I identified most in Heinlein's early works was Rhysling in 'The Green Hills of Earth.'”

“I first read Heinlein when I was very young.”

“Seeming and knowing made hideous faces at one another across the breadth of her mind.”

“I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.”

“I was a weird but definite kid, and there were essentially no gender roles for me to fit into.”

“I was testing a hypothesis. But it was right, and then I had a unicorn to deal with. You can't just say, 'Thank you so much, go away now' to a unicorn, the way you can with atomic particles.”

“Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.”

“I did always think of Heinlein as a strict rationalist, although a dispassionate examination of his works doesn't support that.”

“It's worse than treachery. He's using force. Is that worse than guile?”

“It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.”