Michael Bishop

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

"“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.”"

"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."

"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."

"What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that."

"Coercion is the tool of the desperate."

"Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?"

"“Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.” “The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.” “Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.”"

"Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced."

"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.”"

"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.”"

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

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

"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."

"Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented."

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

"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."

"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."

"Time, as it always does, passed."