Tom Shippey Quotes

• 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

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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