Words Are My Matter

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.

Capitalism flourishes in Elfland.

Writers of fantasy are often less modest now that what they do is recognised as literature, or at least as a genre of literature, or at least as a subliterary genre, or at least as a commercial product.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything.

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.
Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.

The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.

I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.