Melissa Scott Quotes & Sayings

This was what she hated most about the on-line world, the shadows as much as the bright lights of the legal nets: too many men assumed that the nets were exclusively their province, and were startled and angry to find out that it wasn't...rather than ever admit fear, they walked with raised hackles, looking for a fight. — Melissa Scott

Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love. — Melissa Scott

This is what she hated most about the on-line world, the shadows as much as the bright lights of the legal nets: too many men assumes that the nets were exclusively their province, and were startled and angry to find out that it wasn't. — Melissa Scott

..she can feel that burden sometimes like a wall pressing in over the dome of the false sky that bounds the city.
*Someone has to*, she says again, as if the ghost is somewhere in the machines that create this Seaheaven, as if he might have cared and turns away, walks back down the vivid street, the dust soft and almost real against her feet. — Melissa Scott

They usually spent the night apart, though in the morning they woke twined more often than not, as though in sleep in their bodies sought each other. In wine and dream comes truth: the old proverb slipped through his mind unbidden. — Melissa Scott

Power rides her fingers, she moves from datashell to datashell, walking the nets like the ghost of a shadow, her trail vanishing behind her as she goes. She carries power in the dark behind her eyes. — Melissa Scott

like all of her, wrong sex, wrong class, wrong attitude... — Melissa Scott

Maybe that was why it was almost always the underclasses, the women, the people of color, the gay people, the ones who were already stigmatized as being vulnerable, availble, trapped by the body, who took the risk of the wire. — Melissa Scott

You had to draw lines, and that choice was in itself dangerous; all boundaries had a double edge, were like swords that could always be turned against you in the end.
But you still had to choose. — Melissa Scott

Alice in Wonderland, Alice down the rabbit hole, Alice out in Cyberspace, flung along the lines of data, flying across fields of light, the night cities that live only behind her eyes. — Melissa Scott

Technology has its place....We respect and honor the past, but we know we can't completely re-create it, nor do we want to do so. The goal of our household, our community, is to live with honor in this word, and to do so we've surrounded ourselves with the trappings of this community, its symbols of honor and purpose, to remind ourselves and to make it easier to keep our faith. But we can't give up everything of the present, neither the Nets nor, for example, modern medicine, not if we're to honor ourselves by taking proper care of our families and our children. We're creating a should-have-been, not what actually was.

--Ingvar Boneless, p. 246 of The Jazz — Melissa Scott

You know damn well that's not how the wire works, and if you weren't afraid of it, you'd have one yourself. It's the same as the implants, just like the dollie-slots, but it gives me an edge, yeah, because I'm not afraid of it, of what I can do with it. — Melissa Scott

There were still too many people who were afraid of a technology that eluded them, still more who would never have access and resented and feared it in equal measures. Mobilize those groups just once, find a demagogue-and there always were demagogues-and the nets would find themselves destroyed. — Melissa Scott