Quotes from The Snow Queen

Joan D. Vinge ·  448 pages

Rating: (10.5K votes)


“But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?"

"Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything...and not doing it only because you can.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you...just let me love you now.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that... that gentleness isn't... weakness.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen



“I am only a cup that knowledge holds. It does not to knowledge matter how poor the cup is. It is the wisdom of those who drink of me that me wise makes. Fools make a sibyl foolish, wherever she is.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Yes, she made me love her. But she didn't mean to. She took by giving... and that makes all the difference.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become doctors? Except for the sadists, of course, who simply enjoy the blood and the pain.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Most people simply aren’t unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don't we? We have to go on looking for justice... and settling for revenge.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen



“How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days!”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“You've made her so beautiful; when she's come to take your life away.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares...heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


“Things change all the time; but how much of it is real? Does any choice any of us ever makes, no matter how important it seems, really cause a ripple in the greater scheme of things?”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen



“Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn’t act, it allows. And that’s what gives it so much power.” He”
― Joan D. Vinge, quote from The Snow Queen


About the author

Joan D. Vinge
Born place: in Baltimore, Maryland, The United States
Born date April 2, 1948
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Popular quotes

“Back in bed I listen to every sound. The plastic tarp over the table on the balcony crunching in the cold wind. the two short clicks in the walls before the heat comes on with a low whoosh. I hear a constant base hum all around, the nervous system of the building, carrying electricity and gas and phone conversations to all our respective little boxes. I listen to it all, the constant, the rhythmic, and the random. It's hard to measure the night by sound, but it can be done. I know that when the traffic noise is quietest, it's about 4:30 in the morning. I know that when the 'Times' hits the door, it's around 5. Now the clock says it's morning, 5:45, but the November sky still says midnight. I hear the elevator ding twenty yards down the hall outside our door. Seven seconds later, I hear his keys in our lock, then his heavy backpack hitting the floor. I hear the refrigerator door open, the unsealing vacuum wheezing as the cold inside air meets the dry heat in the apartment. The cupboard door. A glass. The crescendoing fizz of a new two-liter Diet Coke bottle opening. It's a one-sided conversation with no one actually talking. I lie in the dark, close my eyes, and try not to listen to his movements around apartment. these are the sounds of our life together before it got so messy. I want to say something back. Anything, anything that sounds like things sounded last summer. Even just to myself. Just something out loud.
The inside of my eyelids turn pink. My door has been opened and the light from the hallway shines through them. I won't open them. There is no noise.
Like an eclipse, the world behind my closed eyes goes dark again. For just one second, before I feel a kiss on my right eye. I keep them closed. A kiss on the left one. I open them. Jack looks down at me and closes his eyes. He leans forward and puts his forehead on my chest and goes limp.
''Blues Clues' is on,' he says softly into my tee shirt. His muffled voice vibrating only a half inch away from my heart.”
― Josh Kilmer-Purcell, quote from I Am Not Myself These Days


“Are you dying?"
Cato lit his cigarette. "It's not acute, perhaps, but we're all dying, Harry.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from Phantom


“He takes a deep breath and gives me one of those smiles that almost blinds me. The kind of smile that makes me want to drag him to a little chapel in the woods, say I do, and make him the last boy I ever kiss.”
― Jillian Dodd, quote from Date Me


“All that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Lady of the Rivers


“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”
― Brian Malloy, quote from The Year of Ice


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