Top 40 Joan D. Vinge Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.”

— Joan D. Vinge

Featured in: Hate Quotes

2. “Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.”

— Joan D. Vinge

3. “For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.”

— Joan D. Vinge

4. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.”

— Joan D. Vinge

5. “And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.”

— Joan D. Vinge

6. “Theres no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.”

— Joan D. Vinge

7. “Myth is, after all, the neverending story.”

— Joan D. Vinge

8. “The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.”

— Joan D. Vinge

9. “Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.”

— Joan D. Vinge

10. “Besides, wouldn’t it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?”

— Joan D. Vinge

11. “Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what’s taken us so far.”

— Joan D. Vinge

12. “Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don’t we? We have to go on looking for justice... and settling for revenge.”

— Joan D. Vinge

13. “Don’t worry. You’re safe now. You’ve got nothing left to steal.”

— Joan D. Vinge

14. “Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.”

— Joan D. Vinge

15. “Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.”

— Joan D. Vinge

16. “To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you’d ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.”

— Joan D. Vinge

17. “The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.”

— Joan D. Vinge

18. “Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.”

— Joan D. Vinge

19. “Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.”

— Joan D. Vinge

20. “The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.”

— Joan D. Vinge

21. “Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.”

— Joan D. Vinge

22. “Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.”

— Joan D. Vinge

23. “Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.”

— Joan D. Vinge

24. “All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become doctors? Except for the sadists, of course, who simply enjoy the blood and the pain.”

— Joan D. Vinge

25. “The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.”

— Joan D. Vinge

26. “But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.”

— Joan D. Vinge

27. “These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.”

— Joan D. Vinge

28. “Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.”

— Joan D. Vinge

29. “What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.”

— Joan D. Vinge

30. “A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.”

— Joan D. Vinge

31. “What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.”

— Joan D. Vinge

32. “As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.”

— Joan D. Vinge

33. “Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.”

— Joan D. Vinge

34. “Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.”

— Joan D. Vinge

35. “Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.”

— Joan D. Vinge

36. “Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn’t act, it allows. And that’s what gives it so much power.” He.”

— Joan D. Vinge

37. “How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days!”

— Joan D. Vinge

38. “I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.”

— Joan D. Vinge

39. “Yes, she made me love her. But she didn’t mean to. She took by giving... and that makes all the difference.”

— Joan D. Vinge

40. “You’ve made her so beautiful; when she’s come to take your life away.”

— Joan D. Vinge

41. “Most people simply aren’t unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown.”

— Joan D. Vinge

42. “I stood where they’d left me. I watched them get smaller and smaller as they went down the hallway, leaving me there without a word, not even looking back. Only I was getting smaller and smaller, being swallowed up in the suffocating emptiness of the silent house; so that by the time they came back again, I would have disappeared.”

— Joan D. Vinge

43. “Things change all the time; but how much of it is real? Does any choice any of us ever makes, no matter how important it seems, really cause a ripple in the greater scheme of things?”

— Joan D. Vinge

44. “Laws were made by men, and men made mistakes.”

— Joan D. Vinge

45. “There were some things even the rules of an absolute human overlord had no right to deny, and one of them was justice.”

— Joan D. Vinge

46. “Jule was a poet – poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.”

— Joan D. Vinge