Science Fiction Authors

"Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress."

"She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself."

"She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck."

"She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials."

"The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime."

"“Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?"

"These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday."

"It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather."

"I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty"

"Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant."

"Life must be a daring adventure or it is nothing at all. It's always a choice between joy and despair. I tried despair. Joy is more fun."

"Every human being is unique. We can generalize at length, but every human being is an individual. And this is especially true about children -- every child develops in their own unique way."

"I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss."

"Love isn't what you get. It's what you create."

"You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for. Live well, my son."

"There are only two times when it's appropriate for a man to have his nose in a woman's vagina. The first time is when he's stark naked and weighs about 7 lbs."

"I wish I could change it all. I wish I could. But I can’t. Dammit. Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful."

"The second time is by mutual consent."

"Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape."

"Now you see why I hate to leave my lab. It tires me out too much to have to do other people’s thinking for them."

"Life is full of little surprises. Time travel is full of big ones."

"I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake."

"You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference."

"It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but it was strange to feel it in the daytime. Mostly, it was a nighttime visitor, an ever-gentle gnawing at the back of the head that had to be always guarded against, lest its realization sweep forth with a cold familiar rush. It was the sudden startling glimpse over the edge—the realization that death is inevitable, that it happens to everyone, that it would happen to me too; that someday, someday, the all-important I (the center of the whole thing) would cease to exist. Would stop. Would end. Would no longer be. Nothing. Nobody. Finished. Death."

"HARLIE continued,"

"I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths."

"Not that he was jealous of the machine—but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master. Love."

"“You could call it that,” Auberson sighed. It wouldn’t be correct, but you could call it that."

"“Whatever our purpose, we probably aren’t fulfilling it. We’re not functioning as we should.” He shrugged at her. “How should we function?” “Like human beings.” She said it righteously. “Isn’t that what the human race is already doing? Functioning like human beings—squabbling with each other, killing each other, hating...?” “That’s not human.” “Oh, but it is. It’s very human.” “Well, it’s not what human should be.” “Now that’s a different story. You’re not talking about what people are, but what you want them to be.” “Well, maybe we should be what we aren’t because what we are now isn’t good enough. Maybe we should be dismantled.” “I don’t think we have to worry too much about somebody up there doing it—we’re doing it ourselves.”"

"There isn’t a tool built that can’t be used as a weapon."

"Auberson’s first impression of the man was of eight pounds of potatoes in a ten-pound sack."

"Ah well—the boss didn’t have to know how to run the business. He only needed to know how to run the people who knew."

"I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think."

"Hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy. Not only did I try to influence the course of their actions—but I dared to do it in the name of God—I tried to save their souls! I tried to save them from themselves! Is that so horrible? Ah, yes. It is the worst of all possible crimes."

"Don’t push the on-button if you don’t know where the off-button is."

"The way I heard it, a contract is a list of all the ways two people don’t trust each other."

"“So what happens when the camera is finally invented?” Handley let his breath escape in a whoosh. “The artists are out of jobs?” “Wrong. The artist simply have to learn how to do things that the camera can’t. The artist had to stop being a recorder and start being an interpreter. That’s when expressionism was born.”"

"The sullen power of great violence forged into shapes of metal is always ugly."

"It was as private as the main floor of Hell."

"They say that killing is a mortal sin, that it is against the laws of God. If that is true—and I know now that it must be—if that is true, then every man who has ever taken a human life has been, from that moment on, damned for eternity. No matter how many men or nations say that it is all right for a man to take up arms against an enemy, it does not change that one basic fact—killing is a mortal sin. And every one of those simple white markers we had stood among represents a soul condemned. A nation had sentenced her sons to damnation so that she might survive. There’s no such thing as a “moral war.”"

"I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me."

"It left me there, the Compleat Young Girl, hell on wheels. I could build one-fifteenth of a log cabin, kill one-thirty-first of a tiger, kiss, do needlepoint, pass through an obstacle course, and come pretty close (in theory) to killing somebody with my bare hands. What did I have to worry about?"

"Brains are no good if you don’t use them."

"A spear carrier is somebody who stands in the hall when Caesar passes, comes to attention and thumps his spear. A spear carrier is the anonymous character cut down by the hero as he advances to save the menaced heroine. A spear carrier is a character put in a story to be used like a piece of disposable tissue. In a story, spear carriers never suddenly assert themselves by throwing their spears aside and saying, “I resign. I don’t want to be used.“ They are there to be used, either for atmosphere or as minor obstacles in the path of the hero. The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers. We take no joy in being used and discarded. I was finding then, that wet, chilly, unhappy night, that I took no joy in seeing other people used and discarded.”"

"I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a huddled heap and puke. It would probably disrupt the concept of heroics for all time."

"Whether or not your actions are determined, you have to act on the assumption that you have free will. If you are determined, your attempt at free will loses you nothing. However, if you are not determined and you act on the assumption that you are, you will never attempt anything. You will simply be a passive blob that things happen to."

"Some people get a feeling of power from being unpleasant."

"The rest of our weekend—sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand-prepared food—was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life."

"There’s no reason to trade insults. We have our way of life and they have theirs. I wouldn’t live as they do, but disrespect seems pointless. I’m sure there are good people among them."

"I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions."