Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Moon

There is something quietly radical in Moon's phrasing: she doesn't describe writing as self-expression, but as self-erasure. "Submerge my ego" frames the novelist's job less as performance than as controlled surrender, a willingness to let someone else's inner weather displace your own. The line also hints at an ethical stance. If you can genuinely "let his perceptions take over", you are practicing a kind of imaginative empathy that isn't sentimental; it's technical, disciplined, and often uncomfortable. You have to inhabit blind spots, rationalizations, even ugliness without flinching or correcting the record.

The gendered pronoun matters. Moon, a woman writing in genres historically dominated by male protagonists and male readerships (especially in military-inflected science fiction where she became influential), signals a deliberate crossing of identity lines. It's not "a character's perceptions", but "his". Subtext: the self is not the default center, and authorship isn't permission to moralize from above. It's permission to ventriloquize convincingly.

Contextually, Moon's work often treats competence, duty, and institutional power with a soldier's eye for procedure and consequence. That sensibility shows up here as craft talk, not mysticism. "Could" is doing work, too: a novel offers the space to sustain that possession over time, to let a consciousness accumulate and harden into worldview. The quote is a defense of fiction's distinctive power: not to argue, but to induce temporary conversion.