Top 80 Elizabeth Moon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.”

— Elizabeth Moon

2. “One thing nobody can do better than you is be you.”

— Elizabeth Moon

3. “I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can’t really do much with those in a fantasy setting.”

— Elizabeth Moon

4. “Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women.”

— Elizabeth Moon

5. “It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong.”

— Elizabeth Moon

6. “Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.”

— Elizabeth Moon

7. “This individual does not know where initiative ends and rocket-propelled idiocy begins.”

— Elizabeth Moon

8. “Even if a tamed wolf makes a good sheepdog, he will never understand how the sheep feel... You are most fortunate. For having been, as you thought, a coward, and helpless to fight – you know what that is like. You know what bitterness that feeling breeds – you know in your own heart what kind of evil it brings. And so you are most fit to fight it where it occurs.”

— Elizabeth Moon

9. “I revear all the gods but those that delight in cruelty. If Ra’s light is kindly in your eyes than may his light shine on us all.”

— Elizabeth Moon

10. “Normal’ is a dryer setting.”

— Elizabeth Moon

11. “I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.”

— Elizabeth Moon

12. “Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they’re related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don’t notice that.”

— Elizabeth Moon

13. “Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.”

— Elizabeth Moon

14. “No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.”

— Elizabeth Moon

15. “We do not argue that war is better than peace; we are not so stupid as that. But it is not peace when cruelty reigns, when stronger men steal from farmers and craftworkers, when the child can be enslaved or the old thrown out to starve, and no one lifts a hand. That is not peace: that is conquest, and evil.”

— Elizabeth Moon

16. “Of death I am as certain as any mortal, Ammerlin, but defeat is certain only in despair.”

— Elizabeth Moon

17. “And as Paksenarrion is there, perhaps she will ride back with me to Fin Panir to see the necklace.”

— Elizabeth Moon

18. “But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.”

— Elizabeth Moon

19. “No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.”

— Elizabeth Moon

20. “The test of a sword is not its polish but its temper.”

— Elizabeth Moon

21. “It is easy to fool people into thinking I am like everyone else in encounters like this. If the other person likes to talk, as this woman did, it is easier. All I have to say are a few conventional things and smile, and it is done.”

— Elizabeth Moon

22. “Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.”

— Elizabeth Moon

23. “You have fought a hard battle, in hard conditions, and held a position until help came. Think of it like that.”

— Elizabeth Moon

24. “A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.”

— Elizabeth Moon

25. “People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day – even hour to hour.”

— Elizabeth Moon

26. “I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I’m fine, good night, please, thank you, you’re welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.”

— Elizabeth Moon

27. “Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.”

— Elizabeth Moon

28. “The things that were so bad, that hurt so. If I forget them, if I forget such things still happen, how can I help others? My scars prove that I know myself what others suffer.”

— Elizabeth Moon

29. “One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.”

— Elizabeth Moon

30. “It is all knowing what to start with. If you start in the right place and follow all the steps, you will get to the right end.”

— Elizabeth Moon

31. “My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.”

— Elizabeth Moon

32. “Never show how smart you are, dears, or someone will envy you.”

— Elizabeth Moon

33. “There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.”

— Elizabeth Moon

34. “Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.”

— Elizabeth Moon

35. “Vengeance is not justice; vengeance is not wise.”

— Elizabeth Moon

36. “In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.”

— Elizabeth Moon

37. “You’ll find, someday,” Paks found herself saying, “that your own tongue cuts you worse than any blade. I.”

— Elizabeth Moon

38. “Miss Sevier in high school told us the police think we have knives or guns in our pockets and that they have killed people who were just trying to get out their IDs. I think that is wrong, but I read where the court decided it was all right if the police were really scared. Yet if anybody else is really scared of the police it’s not all right for the scared person to kill a policeman.”

— Elizabeth Moon

39. “The man who had spread those rumors first had been a sociopath, a clever criminal – why, now that everyone knew about him, did they still believe his lies?”

— Elizabeth Moon

40. “The books said that the problem with autism was in the brain, and that made me feel like a faulty computer, something that should be sent back or scrapped. All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I.”

— Elizabeth Moon

41. “You were not bred to avoid trouble,” Tobai said. “Your family takes it on, shakes it like a dog shaking a rat, and tosses it to one side.”

— Elizabeth Moon

42. “When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things – I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.”

— Elizabeth Moon

43. “Beautiful Belinta, Belle of the Hub Worlds.” Nobody but the residents would call this sector the Hub Worlds, unless they thought the rest of the wheel had fallen off.”

— Elizabeth Moon

44. “My personal feeling about science fiction is that it’s always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.”

— Elizabeth Moon

45. “Paks, if you’ve got a fault it’s that you’re too willing to be ruled. I know what you’ll say – you’ll say that’s how a good soldier is.”

— Elizabeth Moon

46. “It may be far in the future, but there’s some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.”

— Elizabeth Moon

47. “Gravity has no pity,” her mother said. “Nor physics.”

— Elizabeth Moon

48. “But people do not always want peace as much as they want their own way.”

— Elizabeth Moon

49. “I like the Beatles, of course, but that’s when I grew up.”

— Elizabeth Moon

50. “Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.”

— Elizabeth Moon