Fandom Quotes

“It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel”
― John Green Paper Towns

“The thing about fic is that is comes from love. Characters you love so much, that you feel so deeply for, you'll watch them fall in love a thousand different ways, over and over.”
― Emma Mills, This Adventure Ends

“If you broke Elena's heart, Star Wars would spill out. This was a holy day for her -- it was a cosmic event. This was her planets lining up. (Tatooine, Coruscant, Hoth.)”
― Rainbow Rowell, Kindred Spirits

“To call the place an anthill would be like calling the Versailles Palace a single-family home. Earthen ramparts rose almost to the tops of the surrounding trees--a hundred feet at least. The circumference could have accommodated a Roman hippodrome. A steady stream of soldiers and drones swarmed in and out of the mound. Some carried fallen trees. One, inexplicably, was dragging a 1967 Chevy Impala.”
― Rick Riordan, The Hidden Oracle

“Alright. I'm over on the dark side. You'd better have the cookies I've been promised.”
― Danika Stone, All the Feels

“Some people are born to fandom, others have fandom thrust upon them.”
― Nenia Campbell, Nostalgia Trip

“A shipper thrives on emotional scraps, stolen glances and did-they-or-didn't-they tension.”
― tumblr

“The coolest thing about fandom is the friendships made along the way with people who share your passions.”
― Jacquelyn Middleton, London Belongs to Me

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
― Roger Angell, Game Time: A Baseball Companion

“I remember being a teenager and being ashamed of my musical tastes, at least some of them. My Brian Wilson and Beach Boys fandom, which is as important to me as anything else, was almost like a porn stash. Hide that shit, someone's coming! You couldn't look like me and be black in West Philadelphia and love the Beach Boys the way I did.”
― Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

“While the concept of the muse is noteworthy, the development of the muse has changed substantially in today's online world. The tables have practically turned as the artist who is responsible for creating music in today's world is now being the muse to others. They have been responsible for the creation of "fan art," a style of performance where people create new forms of media based off of existing creations.
It was originally that the muse was what prompted the artist to create something new. Today it has changed to where the artist is the muse to others in society.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture

“Everything is normal
Everything is fine
I worry about nothing
Cause nothing's on my mind”
― Marble Hornets

“In truth, it is the act of amassing such details — and discussing them — that breeds the intimacy, but not between the fan and the fangirl: rather, between the fangirls themselves, who are bound together by their curiosity for this otherwise meaningless knowledge.”
― Abby Norman FANGIRLS A Journalist Explores The Modern World of Fandom

“I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away.”
― Spider Robinson, Time Travellers Strictly Cash

“And it’s great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn’t end. Oh, and ‘selfies’! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I’d do it!”
― George R.R. Martin

“One significant development with regards to these muses of modern-day art is that the gender roles that were used in the past are no longer valid. The days where the women were the ones who solely inspired the men are no longer as both men and women alike are able to make efforts to create music and other forms of art.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture

“The world of technology has made it easier for people to get in touch with their modern muses regardless of the genres that they are trying to utilize and even if they create a new genre based on a mixing of others. The potential for modern-day muses is as vast as individual creativity.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture

“And Ghostly, everyone thinks they know Paleandghostly, everyone thinks Paleandghostly doesn’t need anything, doesn’t feel anything, can take care of herself and doesn’t need a thing. She is the single most terrifying woman Draxie has ever met, yes, she’s read every book Draxie knows of and a hell of a lot more of them that she couldn’t even understand, she’s got a mind like diamond-edged steel, she is awesome in a sense of the word older than the internet - and she lives with her mom, in her trailer, in the middle of nowhere, because there’s no-one else to look after her. She sits watching her mom’s mind slowly crumble from its edges inwards while she forgets to drink unless she’s told to and wants to go for a walk down streets she hasn’t lived anywhere near in decades, and Ghostly who should be - Draxie doesn’t even know, running the CIA, creating entire new disciplines of thought, running the country, Ghostly helps her mom wash and cleans the trailer and spends her mind, her ravenous, razor-bright, vicious mind, defending him from everyone on the internet. Even from other fanghosts half the time when she points out that they’re being creepy as all fuck and look maybe you can justify using a character with that name but don’t pretend for one second that you know who he is, because he’s a person you’ll never know the inside of and you don’t get to act like you’re entitled to that. Draxie doesn’t know what Ghostly would do without him. Hate the world, while her mind flayed itself to pieces from the inside. Hate the world and all the injustice in it, and no-one to give a fuck about it. But there’s him. And she says, Oh, good, at least someone’s being sensible …”
― rainjoy, All the Other Ghosts

“And her. What would she do without him?

She’s not special, not like BB and Ghostly, who awe her with their intelligence and the things they’re capable of, all their humbling potential. All she does is write - a lot - because it’s fun. She’s under no illusions, she’s popular through quantity not quality, she’s not bad but she is not Blackbindings and she never will be. She writes because it’s fun. And she thinks about him, and what he does.

She works three jobs she hates, just to keep the bills paid. She wanted to get into journalism but she can’t afford the internships. She already sees what her life will be like, she sees the path ahead, she knows there’s no way off; she’ll never not be working three dead end jobs she hates, she’ll marry her boyfriend and unless there’s an accident they’ll decide almost too late that fuck it they’d better have those kids now or never, because they never will be able to afford them; she’ll never do anything amazing, never be anything amazing, just a person in a world full of people, getting by.

But there’s him. And every time she faces life and thinks she can’t bear it, there’s him. If he can be so brave, can’t she manage the littlest bravery? Because - because her little pointless life that will never mean anything, that will have vanished beyond notice within hardly more than a hundred years if she has those kids to remember her, her dragging, struggling life of bills and broken pipes and fuck it it’s another ramen week unless they can live without cell phones -

If she was in trouble, he’d still rescue her, wouldn’t he? Her life wouldn’t mean anything less to him. He rescues people. She’s still a person, as much as anyone else. She’s not important and she’s not special. But she’s a person. And she wipes her nose on the back of her wrist because she tossed the tissues and that’s what he gave her, and maybe it’s the smallest way to save someone’s life, to let them know they still matter whoever they are, but fuck like it doesn’t mean anything to her. It does. She owes him this, and everything …”
― rainjoy, All the Other Ghosts

“We have fangirl shorthand.”
― Jacquelyn Middleton, London Belongs to Me

“There’s no way to tell him, if she tried she knows she’d only start crying, that there’s this girl in England who’s never met him and never will and he’s saved her life more times over than he’ll ever know, because she knows Blackbindings - Blackbindings who writes like an angel, like she knows what suffering is and she knows how much knowing that matters, who writes so far beyond her years with the sort of control Draxie knows she’ll never have - Blackbindings who is so shy she can barely bring herself to reblog anything, Blackbindings who just has one of the sweetest, quietest, kindest souls Draxie thinks she’s ever known and the sort of brain chemistry that you fight every day of your life, she doesn’t know if Blackbindings would still be here if it wasn’t for him. If she was trapped in this world that breaks her heart and breaks her down, she doesn’t know how long that girl would have lasted if she didn’t think about him being brave for everyone else, caring about everyone else, maybe caring about her, trapped in her own mind an ocean away, using up all the strength she has just to not hurt herself. There are weeks when she cries every single day. And thinks about him, she says. And then she can make herself breathe.”
― rainjoy

“He likes girls on bikes, I like boys with guitars.”
― Beth Garrod, Super Awkward

“I wouldn't encourage any kid to become an Elfquest junkie, or any other kind of junkie. Proportion is what we're talking about. We were just talking about that earlier. Proportion in all ways, in storytelling; any story that has an ax to grind is going to burn itself eventually, like the nihilistic comics that Richard was talking about earlier.”
― Cherie Wilkerson, The Big ElfQuest Gatherum

“The unifying theme I found while reading each chapter as I arranged them for the book was that we are all connected to the timelessness of music and the passion it arouses in all of us. We strive to be more than we are and to make a worthwhile contribution in the world, in much the same way 2CELLOS are doing through their music. This is perhaps the best quality that makes us CELLOGIRLS.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture

“Her gaze darted back to the computer screen. THIS IS YOUR CALL TO ACTION. If she posted this, it needed to be real. She needed people to believe Spartan could come back. They needed to trust that he'd made it out of the ship. It couldn't just be fangirl to fangirl, writing Starveil AU's that never really happened. This would be the guerrilla warfare of character ships. The fans would have to reweave the details they had into a new explanation of those last seconds of film. They'd take no prisoners, leave no wounded fans behind. But, as in any war, that meant the intel behind the revolution had to stay secret for as long as possible.
Fandom had to believe.”
― Danika Stone, All the Feels

“If #SpartanSurvived failed in its efforts, no one would be the wiser. There was no risk to her online persona. No backlash from haters. Anonymity’s cloak both protected her and kept the torch of Spartan alive. Because as much as fandom knew a fan had created the post, the faceless message held the faint promise of authenticity. And if people believed it, then the magic was real. They could change Spartan’s fate, because they thought they could, and tonight’s video would cast the first spell.”
― Danika Stone, All the Feels

“So she's one of the grande dames of fandom? The Madame de Staël of the Starveil world?”
― Danika Stone, All the Feels

“She was determined to keep her promise of 'no fandom' to her mother. Trouble was, fandom was more than a hobby, it was a support system. Without it, Liv had no one to talk to when she was lonely. She had nothing to look forward to after school, and no outlet for creativity. Liv found herself spiraling back into melancholy.
She got up.
She went to classes.
She came home... And then did it all over again. Sleep became the escape that fandom had once been.”
― Danika Stone, All the Feels

“She'd just thrown gasoline on the fire. Now it was up to fandom to keep it burning.”
― Danika Stone, All the Feels

“His features made him look striking, and I wondered if that was actually his personality.”
― Binta Userkaf, Itchikan: 'til death do us part'