Worldbuilding Quotes

“The villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.”

“Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.”

“The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and be able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water.”

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Lightthrough whom is splintered from a single Whiteto many hues, and endlessly combinedin living shapes that move from mind to mind.”

“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”

“Ha-ha!' the fox laughed. '*Just* stories, you say, as if stories mean nothing? Stories are the stuff that sticks the world together. Stories are the mud from which we're all made. The power to imagine stories is the power to remake the world as we dream it.”