Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.
We need an ally of Mydogg's or Gentian's pretending to be among the most loyal allies of the king,' Brigan said. 'Shouldn't be so hard, really. If I shot an arrow out the window I'd probably hit on.
It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big
For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.
I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
I myself grew up when radio was very important. I'd come home from school and turn on the radio. There were funny comedians and wonderful music, and there were plays. I used to pass time with radio.
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
The Catholic Church sees voluntary vampirism as a kind of suicide. I tend to agree. Though the Pope also excommunicated all animators, unless we ceased raising the dead. Fine; I became Episcopalian.
One of the things cops learn first is that everyone lies. Some people to hide things, some people just for the hell of it, but everyone lies. Assume that everyone is hiding something, it saves time.
I'm still a fanboy geek. I always will be. In many ways, if my work still resonates with the audience, it's because I'm still writing from the point of view of the fan, so I'm geeked out constantly.
The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction...the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
History, that is to say, the unconscious, universal life of humanity, in the aggregate, every moment profits by the life of kings for itself, as an instrument for the accomplishment of its own ends.
I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.
How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?
In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.
It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.
I made a drawing for a book I'm working . It's a little drawing of a girl who's ashamed and upset and hides in the corner of the closet. It's the kind of drawing that I feel like I'm really good at.
The only thing was, she didn't really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic that was in the world.
I remember being in a history lesson and saying to my teacher, 'How come you never talk about black scientists and inventors and pioneers?' And she looked at me and said, 'Because there aren't any.'
If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?
He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.
I love spoilers, and I read spoilers all the time. I make people tell me the endings of movies before I go to see them, and yet I refuse to give spoilers. It's kind of unfair, but that's how I roll.
The first rule of new media is nobody gets rich, but everybody gets paid, in a perfect world. Maybe you don't get fabulously wealthy doing your webcomic, but as long as you can make a decent living.
I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted myself to be.
one year as his wife, and id have become one of those abject, quaking women who look at their husbands when someone asks them a question. I've always despised that type, but I see how it happens now
Tis very great pity that they who are so apt to over-rate themselves in smaller matters, shou'd, where it most concerns them to know, and stand upon their Value, be so insensible of their own worth.
A person could last a long while without touch, but once someone had experienced the comfort, joy, and sheer relief of another human body close, the desire to experience that again was hard to deny.
I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.
Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.
I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.
In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch-that is, who should be listened to and when.
In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch that is, who should be listened to and when.
When you come across with a problem in your life, do not always try to solve it; make a long jump like a kangaroo and continue your way! Sometimes problems must be leaped over without touching them!
The spiritual world needs two revolutions: One is to separate God from religion and the other is to separate religion from God! This purification process will make God less human and more universal.
Time is so fast that all times are past times! When you look at a photo of the past, you must know that you are already in the album, someone else is looking at your photo! All times are past times!
You frantically want to make a mark on the history of humanity? You, King of the Fools! In the very distant future, there shall be no history; there shall remain not even a single trace of anything!
You don't die. You just... get really angry and then after you're angry you hurt a lot and then the best thing is that one day you remember something she said or did and you laugh instead of crying.
I'm slowly becoming a repository for decomposing sorrows, regrets, ignored injustice, and forgotten promises. I can still feel its stench. But when I get accustomed to it, I will call it experience.
I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not.
I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.
I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.
You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.
Works without faith are like a fish without water, it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action is as a stone laid.