Nebula Award Winners

"Rutherford was a historian, after all, and secretly enjoyed it when the truth did injury to modern sensibilities."

"He caught his breath, absorbing the impact of the scientific discoveries, the advances in scholarship, the inevitable dwindling into insignificance of issues that had mattered more than his life. He closed his eyes, turned his face away, but he couldn’t stop his understanding. “You see?” said Edward. “They’re all happy pagans nowadays. When they take the trouble to worship at all. Enlightenment swept most of that nonsense away, and good riddance!”"

"Ah, the immortal ocean. Consider the instructive metaphor: every conceivable terror dwells in her depths; she receives all wreckage, refuse, corruption of every kind, she pulls down into her depths human calamity indescribable; but none of this is any consideration to the sea. Let the screaming mortal passengers fight for room in the lifeboats, as the wreck belches flame and settles below the extinguishing wave; next morning she’ll still be beautiful and serene, her combers no less white, her distances as blue, her seabirds no less graceful as they wheel in the pure air. What perfection, to be so heartless. An inspiration to any lesser immortal."

"With the invention of printing, mass standardized culture had become possible. With the inventions of photography and then cinema, the standardization of popular culture began to progress geometrically and its rate of change slowed down. In addition, the complete documentation of daily life made possible by these technological advances presented the mass of humanity, for the first time in history, with a mirror in which to regard itself. Less and less had it been able to look away, as its own image became more detailed and perfect, especially with the burden of information that became available at the end of the twentieth century. What this meant, in practical terms, was that retro was the only fashion."

"“Isn’t that a little hard on him? You’re not only making him feel bad about something he didn’t do, you’re making him feel bad about something that didn’t even shracking happen.” “I believe churches used to call it original sin,” Rutherford agreed, looking crafty. “But what does it matter, if it serves to make him a better man?”"

"“How, in this day and age, can any one of you claim to be better than your fellow human beings?” “Because we are,” said Marilyn Deighton-True with a shrug. “Face reality, Giles, or it will face you. You can spout all the socialiste nouveau crap you like, but it simply doesn’t apply to a meritocracy.”"

"It was growing dusk, the blue hour when solid things take on a certain transparency and phantoms become palpable."

"You have to be pretty damned hot and thirsty to enjoy a soy-milk smoothie, but they were, so it was okay."

"It didn’t matter that they were terrible at being parents; they were also very rich, which meant they could pay other people to love Alec."

"“Alec is beautiful,” said Jill, bending down to kiss him. “Like a mushroom cloud!” scoffed Balkister."

"Doubtless he was going to start bragging about being a god. It went with the profile of this sort of lunatic."

"Edward holds up a hand for silence. “If you please, Captain: he’s thinking. Let us savor the exquisite rarity of the moment.”"

"Is God a cruel bastard or what, to make love so painful?"

"Times had changed. Sooner or later, they always did."

"“You’ve no appreciation of high romance, that’s your trouble,” Lewis said, climbing in and starting the motor. Joseph nodded somberly. “Boy meets girl, girl loses boy, everybody dies. I just don’t get it.”"

"Any brute will demand his right to be a law unto himself, beating his wife and his children as he pleases, and defend that right with his father’s rifle and think himself a patriot."

"A missionary may persuade a painted savage to worship a cross rather than an idol; but he will not make laws that send that savage’s children to school, where they might learn to make the desert they inhabit another Eden by means of the advanced sciences. He may persuade his flock to love one another for his God’s sake, but he’ll invariably urge them to slaughter any neighboring tribe that still worships stone idols. This is the failure of religion as a force for the common welfare."

"“And when there is peace at last, and when men are no longer distracted by the ravages of war and crime, then the real work begins. Mankind has grasped at science and invention to improve his lot; when he truly understands that he can wield those tools to improve himself, he will lay the cornerstone of the earthly paradise,” Edward said. “What might not science achieve, in a world where a nation’s resources weren’t continually drained by strife?"

"Terrorism was too tame for the Scots: they used lawyers."

"His nation of liberty was founded on the backs of Negro slaves and at the cost of exterminating the aborigines. As far as I can tell, the Yankee’s idea of freedom is his right to carry a pistol with which he may shoot strangers in the street."

"Did you know what would happen next? Did you know and sit there like God, silent, remorseless, useless?"

"Privilege tends to soften the brain, or so I’ve observed."

"Ah, Los Angeles. One disaster after another, always has been."

"The same intact culture that made them good businessmen also made many of them lousy parents."

"I looked up at several pockmarks in the nearest wall; if they weren’t bullet holes, the place had damned big hailstones."

"Religion has its place, certainly, in reinforcing ethical behavior amongst the masses, but any sufficiently enlightened secular laws will have the same effect. After all, most of the creeds of the world have essentially the same purpose, have they not? To enjoin men to be what we call moral, which is to say civilized. A civilized man obey the rule of law, he acknowledges that he must not injure his neighbors, and if injured by them, he must appeal to law for satisfaction rather than indulge in burning their houses over their heads as they sleep. Civilization is the ideal for which we strive, with so little perceptible success; yet we do succeed, in inches and over years."

"“There,” Joseph said. “There’s your answer.” “It’s not an answer, little man. It’s many, many more questions.”"

"“Like children, they’re bored by complicated things. More than bored: they feel threatened. Give a child mashed potatoes and butter, and he’s happy. He doesn’t want to try the rich sauce with capers, in fact he’ll cry if he’s forced to taste it. You see what I mean? But, listen, Joseph. A child is easy to control. Keep him happy, and he’ll believe what he’s told to believe.”"

"I may cut my coat to follow fashion, sir, but not my conscience."

"Has there ever been a revolution that produced something better than what it overthrew? The only thing people learn from being oppressed is how to oppress others!"

"“So as we’ve seen, not one faith has ever lived up to its promises. The world has never become a paradise, quite the opposite, in fact: think of the millions upon millions slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned for this great idea, this good news, this revolution. The visionary who works against human nature to impose his—or her—sweeping vision on the world is inevitably its worst enemy. Now, who isn’t? Consider the work of certain individual mortals who set themselves simple tasks. They saw no need to raise armies; they saw no need for revolution or bloodshed; they worked instead for realistic goals with the tools they had. And they succeeded, and their works have been of lasting benefit to humanity.” He erased the board with relish and chalked a new set of names: }}. “People like these have done more to relieve human misery than any prophet with a manifesto ever will.”"

"Smashing things is the violent way stupid mortal monkeys solve their problems."

"No nation, creed, or race was any better or worse than another; all were flawed, all were equally doomed to suffering, mostly because they couldn’t see that they were all alike. Mortals might have been contemptible, true, but not evil entirely. They did enjoy killing one another and frequently came up with ingenious excuses for doing so on a large scale—religions, economic theories, ethnic pride—but we couldn’t condemn them for it, as it was in their moral natures and they were too stupid to know any better."

"And what a clever guy this Harpole is, isn’t he? Awfully good at noticing all kinds of little unusual things about people and keeping them on file in his head. So he’s built a theory around us, has he? He added two and two and came up with five, but nobody else in the house was aware there was anything to count."

"When you hear a story, do you believe only the nice parts? Truth isn’t like a baked fish, where you can eat the flesh and leave the bones and skin. You have to eat it all."

"Just when I thought things couldn’t get any stranger, I was proven wrong."

"Imagine being told that it hadn’t mattered whether the Christians or the Moors got Spain! I can still remember my shock. I got over it fairly quickly, though, because by that time I had learned enough history to know that in the long run it never mattered a damn where any particular race of people planted its collective ass."

"The leaf that spreads in the sunlight is the only holiness there is. I haven’t found holiness in the faiths of mortals, nor in their music, nor in their dreams: it’s out in the open field, with the green rows looking at the sky. I don’t know what it is, this holiness: but it’s there, and it looks at the sky."

"“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”"

"How could millennia-old superbeings be so boring?"

"The truth is, Homo sapiens sapiens is pretty much the same the world over, regardless of skin color or technological development. Racists and provincial types have problems with this fact, but it is a fact. All mortals have the same potential, and only chance determines who’s playing a spinet or who’s clubbing dinner to death with a big rock. And, you know what? Mortals adapt to the environment in which they’re placed. Switch babies between savages and technologicals, and nobody notices! I know, because I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen the son of a club-carrying cave dweller fuming because his accounting software wasn’t quite adequate for his needs. All humans have the same brain package."

"“They find us outlandish,” Lopez admitted. “Extravagant. Eclectic. Unfathomable.”"

"True believers aren’t real receptive to the idea that what they’re telling you is just mythology."

"When you laugh at something, you don’t fear it anymore."

"I’ve been in the entertainment industry ever since, in one capacity or another. It’s better than the Inquisition. Usually."

"Faith and its attendant rituals sound like a good deal, the whole eternal salvation thing, but inevitably they lead to fear, oppression, the rack and flames."

"“Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment,” I quoted."

"I had a productive day, without the distraction of conversation."

"Do you remember that terrible moment, señors, when the self-righteousness of your youth died? When all the stern warnings of your elders, ignored until the consequences abruptly came crashing down on your head, made you see in a flash that the warnings hadn’t been unfair or mean-spirited or blind, they’d been right? All along your elders had been trying to tell you about the black joke that is life, trying to help you and save you from pain. But you insisted on running straight into the trap, mocking them as you ran, to the agony that was irreversible and permanent, with no one to blame, finally, but yourself. It’s not good to see yourself in the mirror then."

"The awful bottom line, of course, is that if you’re going to rule the world, you have to have absolute power, and everybody knows what absolute power does."