Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer.

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.

Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.