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Tom Shippey Quotes

While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.

While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.

Tom Shippey
Persistence, Giving, Luck
Tom Shippey (2014). “The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition”, p.183, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common...to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time.

Tom Shippey
Memories, Reading, Years

Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.

Tom Shippey
Trying, Fiction, Literature

The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.

Tom Shippey
Loyalty, Echoes, Filters
Tom Shippey (2014). “The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition”, p.304, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Many sci-fi authors, we know, are as clever and tricky as so many Coyotes. Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.

Tom Shippey
Clever, Past, Imagination

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