Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.

The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?

These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.

Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.

But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating all at the same time.

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

The President forgot to mention the Moon, Mars, and the federal deficit - all of which are sky-high.

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!

Moon rocks are OK when everyone is eating.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times... and safely home again.

The soldiers did go away and their towns were torn down; and in the Moon of Falling Leaves (November), they made a treaty with Red Cloud that said our country would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow.

What will it profit this country if we... put our man on the Moon by 1970 and at the same time you can't walk down Woodward Avenue in this city without fear of some violence?

Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.

Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.

I think that when NASA works on a moon shot, they know too well that all of the people working on it must do their job at 110 percent. Sometimes they probably put in 18 hour days, but they're aiming for the moon, and that's what counts.

Small samples in the centrifuge will spin at varying rates to create synthetic gravity, like the gravity of Mars or the gravity of the moon, and measure how the specimens respond within the centrifuge.

My first two records were more energetic; Phantom Moon is subtle, quiet; so these various reactions are just something I expected.