Fantasy Authors

"But while India fixed her eyes on the Ultimate she did not forget that objective science is the beginning of wisdom. There the foundations of mathematical and mechanical knowledge were well and truly laid by the Noble Race."

"“You weren’t waiting up for me, were you?” Gerbert shrugged. “You know how little I sleep. I was contemplating my sins.” “Sleep will do you more good.”"

"“Peace.” Gerbert rolled the word on his tongue. “Is that what it is? I’d been calling it happiness.”"

"There was no help for it. He was what he was, and that was an incorrigible meddler. Which, he reflected, was not an inadequate description of a mage."

"Now there was sophistry. A mage was a perilous beast, but a mage who was also a logician and a theologian was deadly enough to outface the devil himself."

"Gerbert recognized quality in the plainness of the woman’s robe, and in the carving of a lintel, and in the hanging of a rug on a whitewashed wall. The only magic in it was the alchemy of taste."

"I am asking you to help me. Our mutual master would stride naked into the desert, trusting in God and in his own brilliance to shield him from the sun. But the desert knows only that it is. Neither gods nor cleverness mean anything to it."

"“So eager still! Do you never tire?” “Oh, yes, my Lord,” said Gerbert. “But when I’ve struggled long and hard, and then at last I understand, I forget everything but that.”"

"Traitors were not cherished even by those who bought them."

"You are a fool, sir priest. Ignorance may excuse you. It will certainly kill you."

"In that instant, Gerbert hated him with a perfect hate. A monster, one could comprehend, and even forgive: one could see that a devil had possessed him. This flawless selfishness was beyond endurance."

"May God preserve us from an honest pope."

"“I would tell you that the West is sadly fallen. What men knew once, they know no longer, nor want to know. It is all iron and edged blades, and lord smiting lord for a fistful of power. They dream of empires, and they kill for a furlong of wasteland. “But I, my lord, I want to know what the world is.”"

"We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others. It separates us from the lichen."

"My percussionist thinks you have a touch of Metastasized Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Blek. My diagnosis? You’re an asshole. Sadly, the only known cure is being set on fire and dropped off a balcony."

"A cow goes moo; a sheep goes baa; a celebrity correspondent goes who are you wearing?"

"Everyone imitates our groove these days. But we were into poisoning our competition and performing an extended dance sequence on their graves before it was cool."

"Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait."

"“And how does that make you feel?” he crooned in the comforting tone of a therapist who may or may not actually care."

"And then another song began, better than that one. Each song was so impossible, so perfect, so complex, so anatomically baffling, and they only grew more heartbreaking and piercing, the special effects more dazzling, the fire in the ice and the psychic manipulation of the audience, that both of them sobbed and sobbed as if they had lost every last thing in the world. Hours passed. The humans watched in an agony of feeling, in a rictus of involuntary ecstasy and horror and grief and artistic nirvana, their bodies shuddering, their brains a sea of flaming blue emotion. The cat watched with semi-mild interest. It was all right, she supposed, if you were into that sort of thing."

"Everybody fucks.…Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light."

"Sex is universal, it’s just not evenly distributed."

"I felt like I was the only one who understood that the only wall we could ever build against What’s Going On was the glitter and the shine and the synth and the knowing grin that never stops knowing. The show. Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down."

"You can’t stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they’ll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they’ll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards. Except me, of course. I’m superb. Ask anyone. And you’re all right, I suppose. Welcome to being a people, kid. It’s just dreadful up here."

"People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters."

"Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does."

"Oh, certainly it had been alarming at first. But adjusting to certain changes in your circumstances was easy when you didn’t really care about anything. As far as she was concerned, she’d always talked. By some miracle, everyone else had recently achieved the ability to listen properly. She was over the novelty within half an hour. No one listened to her or asked for her input or attended gratefully to her needs any more than they ever had. They were too busy making big monkey fusses over their big monkey problems."

"The universe is a very large and very complicated demonstration of having one’s cake and eating it too. It sees no reason not to have it all."

"Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything pulses to a beat laid down by the Big Bang. Everything feels the drumline of creation from star to sex to song."

"The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?"

"I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you."

"Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie. We’ve watched a lot of your media, you know. It’s an excellent way to evaluate societal sentience. You seem to be very concerned with monsters. Monsters from above, monsters from below, monsters among you, monsters from the sea, radioactive monsters, machine monsters, magical monsters, serial monsters who can only be stopped by monsters with badges. It’s a whole thing with you people. We got terrifically bored after a while. After all, you always win against the monsters, even though you’re the ones slowly cooking your planet because you can’t be bothered not to, butchering one another for fun and profit, making up elaborate stories that start with being calm and treating everyone with kindness and equality but somehow always end with somebody getting enslaved, absolutely obliterating the other species with whom you share a world so you can take a photograph with their corpses or gobble up their best features in hopes of achieving a more satisfying erection, and being generally willing to sell the fleeting, unique, fragile lives of everyone you’ve ever met if it means you can consume a slightly larger share of resources than they can. You can’t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tissue without having to really work for it. None of you seems to be able to stand one another. How will you treat us, if you are allowed to swarm across the galaxy? Which of us have horns or tusks or claws we feel quite attached to that might arouse your sluggish organs? Yes, of course, you’ve done some clever things with your time. No one is denying that rhythmic gymnastics are really just terrific. But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race. It is the behavior of wild animals. Even your babies view anyone who doesn’t look just exactly like their parents with seething suspicion. It’s baked in to you. I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss."

"What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon."

"But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?"

"“Stories are pretty dumb animals. And so aggressive!” I clapped my hands. “Say three ways they’re dumb!” “Let’s see.” Papo counted them off on his fingers. “They’re cold-blooded, they use big words when they ought to use small ones, and they have no natural defense against comets.”"

"Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays."

"They are time, and time eats everything but listens to no one."

"Failure was here before you and she’ll be here after you and she won’t even notice you go."

"He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did."

"And then she’d take off again, with a sort of confused-confounded glance down at me, as though every time she came home, it was a shock to remember that I’d ever been born."

"Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?"

"Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience."

"They looked up and Prince Tsui introduced himself and they didn’t care. Their stomachs were empty."

"We will not be giving ourselves up. Death, then? said Seth. Victory, said Prince Tsui. Call it what you like, Seth replied, the end is the same."

"I told them many things, she said, if you knew what was good for you, you wouldn’t truly believe anything I say without proof."

"She smiled. Everyone is greedy, she said. Even people who have all the money and power in the universe want more to protect what they already have."

"He got in loud fights with Baba all the time. I don’t remember words. Words are never important in arguments, only how loud we shout them."

"Justice is the motive of heartless people, who protect their gold with the sword."

"I will not argue with you a moment more, said Adel. I am tired of the past, and there is so much to do in the present."

"Men gain their thrones by selling their daughters, or sending their sons to die."