Suzette Haden Elgin Quotes & Sayings

Linguistics is our best tool for bringing about social change and SF is our best tool for testing such changes before they are implemented in the real world, therefore the conjunction of the two is desirable and should be useful. — Suzette Haden Elgin

We are men, and human words are all we have: even the Word of God is composed actually of the words of men." (HUNTING THE DIVINE FOX, by Robert Farrar Capon, — Suzette Haden Elgin

You cannot weave truth on a loom of lies. — Suzette Haden Elgin

Confederation Day every blessed year on December 12. — Suzette Haden Elgin

A Grandmother is a safe haven. — Suzette Haden Elgin

First principle: there's no such thing as reality. We make it up by perceiving stimuli from the environment - external or internal - and making statements about it. Everybody perceives stuff, everybody makes up statements about it, everybody - so far as we can tell - agrees enough to get by, so that when I say 'Hand me the coffee' you know what to hand me. And that's reality. Second principle; people get used to a certain kind of reality and come to expect it, and if what they perceive doesn't fit the set of statements everybody's agreed to, either the culture has to go through a kind of fit until it adjusts...or they just blank it out. — Suzette Haden Elgin

This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes. — Suzette Haden Elgin

...wary as any burnt child with an unfamiliar fire to contend with. — Suzette Haden Elgin

It was her favorite cup, emerald-green china with a rim of silver, and sturdy enough to drink from half awake without worrying that she'd crush it, the last unbroken one of a set used for company meals when she was still in Granny School. She despised the cups her mother and grandmother chose to start their days with, delicate white porcelain with the Brightwater Crest on the side, big enough to hold maybe three good swallows, and so frail they felt like eggshells in your hand. She could face those later in the day if need be, but not before breakfast, and at no time did she admire them. — Suzette Haden Elgin

The two men sat there together, in the kind of silence that's not empty because it has the thoughts of two longtime friends to fill it. — Suzette Haden Elgin

No longer were there "doctors" of anthropology and physics and literature to offend the real doctors and confuse the public; they had put a stop to that, as they had put a stop to so many things that were unseemly and inappropriate. — Suzette Haden Elgin

If you behave like a doormat, expect to be stepped on and don't complain about it. — Suzette Haden Elgin

Nazareth wasted no time in anything she did, and years of experience with her brood of nine had given her a firm way of bustling another person along that was impressive even to a professional nurse who did professional person-bustling. — Suzette Haden Elgin

A symbol is best answered by a symbol. Not by a . . . meat cleaver. — Suzette Haden Elgin

But she would learn. Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely. She would have all the company she could ever need. * — Suzette Haden Elgin

He stayed carefully away from the profs, he ran the data they gave him without allowing any of it to register in his memory - that's what you have computers for, so you don't have to put stuff in your own memory - and that was all he did. — Suzette Haden Elgin