Science Fiction Authors

"Rejection is nature's way of telling you to write a better book."

"I have final say on the plot and characters, she has final say on the words and descriptions."

"She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired."

"Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them."

"“Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.” The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway."

"They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another."

"A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force."

"Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts."

"Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens."

"People think it’s a failure to live alone. But it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else."

"I was trying to warn you. But... you have no Cause. You and I, we have no Cause. We have only the army. But if a soldier fights only for soldiers, he cannot ever win. It is only the soldiers who die."

"Men cannot be threatened into the kind of fight they will have to put up to win. They will have to be led."

"He had forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely."

"He moved closer to the wall up there, past mounds of bodies, no line any more, just men moving forward at different speeds, stopping to fire, stopping to die, drifting back like leaves blown from the fire ahead."

"It's no good trying to get yourself killed, General. The Lord will come for you in His own time."

"If the war goes on-and it will, it will-what else can we do but go on? It is the same question forever, what else can we do? If they fight, we will fight with them. And does it matter after all who wins? Was that ever really the question? Will God ask that question, in the end?"

""A Holy War," Longstreet said. He shook his head. He did not think much of the Cause. He was a professional: the Cause was Victory. It came to him in the night sometimes with a sudden appalling shock that the boys he was fighting were boys he had grown up with. The war had come as a nightmare in which you chose your nightmare side. Once chosen, you put your head down and went on to win."

"I've been thinking on your theories of defensive war, and look, Pete, if you don't mind the opinion of an aging military genius, just this once? Technically, by God, you're probably right. Hell, you're undoubtable right. This may be a time for defensive war. But, Pete, this aint the army for it. We aren't bred for the defense."

"I don't know what else we could have done. Sir, I'm sorry. But it started out as a minor scrap with a few militia and the next thing I know I'm tangling with half the Union Army."

"It is unbecoming to a soldier, all this book-learning."

"Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came... because it was the right thing to do."

"Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land-there's always more land. it's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other."

"The man was looking his way, with glasses. Buford waved. You never knew what old friend was out there. The Reb officer took off his hat, bowed formally."

"But the men marched believing they were behind McClellan. He was the only general Chamberlain had ever seen who was truly loved. The Rebs loved Lee, no doubt of that. And we loved Mac. Chamberlain thought: Two things an officer must do, to lead men. This from old Ames, who never cared about love: You must care for your men's welfare. You must show physical courage."

"And if it all has no meaning, if there really is Nobody Above who really gives a damn, if there are really no rules, still, a man can make his own rules and with luck he can get by."

"They are volunteers: last of the great volunteer armies, for the draft is beginning that summer in the North. They have lost faith in their leaders but not in themselves."

"General Meade has his son as adjutant." "That's different. Generals can do anything. Nothing quite so much like God on earth as a general on a battlefield."

"Honor without intelligence is a disaster. Honor could lose the war."

"But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and lacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as a foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land."

"Just put one man behind a tree. You can hardly see him from two hundred yards away, but he can see you. And shoot. And shoot again. How many men do you think it will take to get to that man behind the tree, in a ditch, defended by cannon, if you have to cross an open field to get him? How many men? Well, I've figured it. At least three. And he'll kill at least two."

"That night, at supper, someone remarked casually that since the army needed ammunition, wouldn't it be proper for the ammunition factory to stay open on Sunday? Most of the officers agreed that it had not yet come to that."

"One thing I'm very glad to see. Your General Lee is a moralist, as are all true gentlemen, of course, but he respects minor vice, harmless vice, when he finds it in others. Now that's the mark of a true gentlemen. That is what distinguishes the man so to me, aside from his military prowess, of course. The true gentlemen has no vices, but he allows you your own."

"Oh, by the way, there's a story going around, do you know? They say that General Lee was asleep, and the army was marching by, and fifteen thousand men went by on tiptoe so as not to wake him."

"“I haven’t organized my life as a narrative, you know. I’m not sure you’ll understand.” “As listeners, we are not required to understand,” said Qiingi. “Only to care.”"

"“The great commandment of the narratives is that your life must be meaningful,” said Charon. “If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed.”"

"What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion."

"Even the gods fight boredom in vain."

"Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She’d known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies... The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn’t just represent certain values—they were those values, in some way."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."

"Only the dead are free of the influence of others."

"“Technologies are control systems,” she said. “They dictate your reality.”"

"“Something’s wrong.” Axel shrugged. “That statement probably applies to every second I’ve spent on this blasted world.”"

"“Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever.” She shook her head. “I’ve been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I’m going to enjoy missing it.” She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that that feeling would never end."

"But what good's abundance if nobody can experience it?"

"The being was trying to get him to think about what he was saying, not just recite."

"Her own sincerity returned to her now like the remembrance of a crime."

"“What if they don’t surrender?” “My Lady,” he said, “you never ask that question after you’ve gone to war.”"

"In such a way she had done what her people prized above all else: she had given her respect to those different from herself."

"That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate."

"When she looked around, she saw the same expression of mindless fear in the eyes of the men with her. They were all in the same boat—carried forward by habits of training, minds blank with fear hence too stupid to sensibly turn and run. It was this stupor of fear that would later be counted as courage."