Science Fiction Authors

"People are so lazy, they want everything to be simple, but nothing is simple. Nothing."

"Loopier than a snake in a garden hose."

"Thursday is practically Friday and Friday is Friday."

"“MAY THE FORCE—” “—FEED YOUR HORSE!”"

"People get accustomed to evil like they get accustomed to smog or noise or graffiti! But it doesn’t change what it is."

"We challenge ourselves to try at least four new bizarrities in every week’s groceries."

"Experience exists and therefore is true in its mere existence, but perhaps not beyond. It may not be truthful in reference to anything beyond itself. But it may, in unprocessed form, be representative of truth in that it has not become crusted over with the false encoding of theory. And in art, one may, perhaps, create a distillation of experience, which, by being less rigidly composed and dogmatically-formed than science, be flexible enough to represent or transmit truth, or at least, to point towards it."

"In science, one becomes so obsessed with the number of feathers in a bird’s wing or its mass or muscular strength that one forgets the fact of the bird’s flight, or its beauty, or its existence. One forgets the truth of those things. Similarly, the artist who looks only within, without looking to the minutiae of the bird or the air in which the bird flies or the earth below the air, forgets those apparently solid details that may also lead him to truth. If he never bothers to examine a bird’s mass and strength, then his painting or poem can speak only of his own narcissism."

"You cannot look within, or rather, you refuse to. You fear to. So all of your manipulation of the exterior is ultimately meaningless, because it is devoid of any examined motivation. You seek to change your environment because you fear to gaze at that which makes you want to change it, because you fear that you may have to change yourself."

"“You equate education with a desire to harm learners? Were you a human, I’d say your radicalism were driven by testosterone. In your case, I’d guess motor oil. “Education is not driven by a desire to delude learners or to harm them. On the contrary, it is our noblest activity; we import information—yes, information, the building blocks of knowledge—to students, such that they might assemble their own knowledge-acquisition drives and skills and modes. We educate such that the educated may educate themselves and others. “Indeed, we create the only perpetual motion machine: the self-aware, extra-aware cognitive engine, whose fuel is the world, whose ignition is lesson! We engage not in authoritarianism, but in liberation, for once genuine ignition is achieved, the engine discovers its own fuel; the vehicle, its own momentum."

"They’re everything that’s wrong in this instant-coffee and microwave age. ‘I want it now.’ There used to be that romantic image of going off to Tibet and climbing the mountain to speak to the wise man. And when you got to the top, he could tell you the truths of the universe. Now people wanna take a helicopter to the top—or e-mail him!"

"“The desire to assert that knowledge is pure subjectivity or that knowledge is never more than mere ill-founded belief is rooted in a twisted admiration for moral relativism, or perhaps worse, in an egocentric belief that ‘the universe is a product of my mind, and nothing else.’”"

"And I slept, and dreamt that I gazed through an electron microscope at the surface of the Guernica. I awoke to moonlight, and was troubled, and did not easily return to sleep."

"As Carl Jung said, avoidance of legitimate suffering is the root of all mental illness. And one truth you must suffer is that everything and everyone you love will eventually die. Even gods."

"It was sunset. It didn’t matter. Whatever aesthetic or soular value sunset once possessed in the collective mind, it had long since been scraped into shreds and dust by concrete and reinforced steel. Scraped and scrapped. The sun and moon had long since been overthrown by Argon, Xenon and Neon."

"Duty often had undesirable consequences, but if it did not it would be self-indulgence and hedonism."

"You only fight when someone try walk allova you—but when dey do, you fight wit all you got."

"There it was again: “-25%”. Four lousy, stinking, meaningless, ugly, putrid, festering, deranged little figures on a page. How was it that something as meaningless is a meaningless scribble on a meaningless paper in a meaningless course with a meaningless professor could have so much damn meaning? Oh, right. Philosophy."

"And night descended, October releasing winter to creep forth from its crypt."

"“I caint believe how foolish—!” “Yes. It was foolish,” said Tirhakah. “But freedom alone does not make men intelligent, nor do chains alone make them fools.”"

"The ground I sit on is not the ground I sat on. The ground I sat on breathed and moved and shuttered and moaned. The ground I sit on is still and silent. The ground I sat on pushed out green things and was crawled on by all manner of crawling things and walked on by walking things. The ground I sit on feels no pad nor hoof nor foot nor claw. The ground I sat on was belly-earth, was food-land, was eating-soil. The ground I sit on is soot and silt and frost and weed. So I stand."

"And how did you propose to pay for the apple, if you had no hands? she asked. And the Devil said, Credit. And she asked, Who would give credit to the Devil? And the wicked one answered unto her, You’d be shocked, Toots."

"Novels are long-term relationships, and short stories are flings. In art, as with life, I always opted for relationships."

"When we are creating art, we’re not forensically documenting reality, but rather creating doodles and caricatures expressing often passionate arguments about how one could view the world, but not necessarily our own true convictions."

"Everyone tensed. Rhetorical fingers twitched at the ragged leather of cerebral holsters."

"Sometimes we take an extreme position in art, but that may have more to do with expressing our emotions at the time of creation than of our true moral or strategic convictions."

"Even if victory were possible, it still couldn’t provide meaning or genuine happiness, because saying “I want to be the best” is simply the polite way of saying “I want everyone else to be worse.”"

"“Knowledge,” he said with overwhelming confidence, “can be dismissed as a collection of beliefs, or as you say, dogma, only by those so deluded with solipsism as to have no faith even in their own existence, let alone the existence of external entities—” “Inaccurate—” “I’m not done. ‘Knowledge’ is clearly the conscious affirmation, or verbal, or textual statement of that which is right and true and that of which scientific inquiry informs us.”"

"Time, as it always does, passed."

"Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose. “Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother."

"You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one."

"They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river."

"He forgave these Tropemen, then felt contempt for himself for the presumption of extending forgiveness, then forgave again, then cursed his own vanity, forgave once more, condemned his presumption, and at last forgave even himself."

"A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing."

"Necessary is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention."

"Like all such prophecies, it’s impressive only if not examined too closely."

"Both God and man hold each other in equally beautiful contempt."

"“Magistrate, a problem doesn’t cease to exist simply because you cease to consider it a problem.” ”Very often, Deputy Foutlif, it does.”"

"Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented."

"Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary."

"The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new."

"But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody."

"“Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?” “No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.”"

"Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was."

"Tiglathpileser was a human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone."

"What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?"

"God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is."

"“The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.” “The True Word on what? Everybody’s got his own true word, you know.” “On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion.” “No,” Zoe said. Not every one of them; just the ones that don’t know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.”"

"I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative."

"His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth."