Science Fiction Authors

"“‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried,’ as that poet fellow said, ‘Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.’”"

"“We are greatly complimented, my lord,” Marquis Sherrinford said dryly. “You don’t think we’re gibbering madmen.”"

"I don’t like eating in the dark. Dimly lit restaurants always make me think they’re trying to hide the food."

"An amphibophile is the sort of girl who goes around kissing princes in the hope that one of them will turn into a frog."

"They were a well-behaved group, too; getting in trouble often enough so there could be no doubt about their masculinity, but not enough so that the discipline officer would remember any of their names."

"“How are you on the high wire?” “Wire walking? It’s simple. Any child of ten can do it—with about fourteen years practice."

"“God is just,” he said. “Just what?” I asked. “Just watching.”"

"The trains take us anywhere we want on earth. They’re very fast and dependable. If I remember from history we tried personal mechanical vehicles for a short time, but gave them up as a bad idea. They smell up the road, take up too much room, caused many accidents and just proved a general nuisance."

"“Good thinking,” the tall man agreed. “In this case it’s not true, but it is good thinking.”"

"“A curious mixture, you,” I said, pulling her firmly toward me over the bowl of cement and commencing a lengthy kiss of agreement, exploration, adoration and lust."

"“You’re from Liverpool, of course,” He was very proud of his ability to place different accents. “No,” Sylvia told him. “Boston.”"

"“A lot of things seem to be happening, all at once,” I told Chester. “Enemy action,” he replied. “Huh?” “That’s what you told me once. An old Army motto you found when you were doing those war books. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. This is the third time.”"

"I am not in the habit of letting someone else decide what I can and cannot do."

"“Any truth,” Chester said, “no matter how obscure, or seemingly unimportant, is a piece of the mosaic and a step toward completion.”"

"“Well, what that means is that it doesn’t happen very often. Now it’s happened to one small group of people—us—twice in a short time. That would seem to indicate that,” he ticked a finger, “something’s seriously out of whack in general, or,” he ticked the next finger, “someone’s out to get us in particular; which I feel is quite unlikely. At times in my paranoid past I would have assumed that the Universe is teaming up to get me, but now I’m more objective and I don’t believe that. I think it, but I don’t believe it.”"

"“I mistrust these artificial things,” O’Malley said. “Food doesn’t grow surrounded by tinfoil.”"

"It was obvious that insufficient education was a serious handicap."

"“The rules that society chooses to live by have always struck me as especially fascinating,” she said. “There are things one can do but not talk about, and there are things one can talk about but not do. There are things—not apparently gender-related—that men can do, but not women, and there are things women can do, but not men. We live in an invisible maze, and we have all learned where to turn and when, so as to find our way through.” “Some of the rules are good, Mary, and many are necessary,” Lord Darcy said mildly. “You misunderstood me, my dear,” Mary of Cumberland told him. “As in magic, where there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or the spell won’t work; so in society there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or we won’t understand each other or trust each other, and it will all come tumbling down around us. The problem is that the rules of society, unlike magic, have never been formalized mathematically, and we don’t know which words are essential to the spell and which are just silly words.”"

"“I’ve been taught certain things all my life,” she said. “Just as you have. I’m just as much a prisoner of my training and my environment as you are of yours.” “I never thought that I was,” Carl said. Alyssaunde took his hand. “Neither did I,” she said."

"The Duchess of Cumberland smiled at the little sorcerer. “Really, Master Dandro,” she said. “That’s certainly an orthodox view.” Master Dandro turned to her and smiled a rabbity smile. “Orthodoxy is my only doxy,” he said."

"If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life."

"“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”"

"I would rather do a dangerous job than a job that makes me comatose with boredom."

"What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself."

"It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here."

"There occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit."

"Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?"

"“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said."

"She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones."

"My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."

"He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret."

"Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin."

"If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness."

"She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded."

"“I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be."

"Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together."

"“I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.” “Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming. “But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking. “Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren’t. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that’s all there is.” “What if we were saved for a different reason?” “Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often. “Some people were saved. People like us.” “What do you mean, ‘people like us’?” “People who were good,” Tyler said.”People who weren’t weak.” “Look, it’s not a question of having been bad or...the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”"

"This whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him."

"“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?” “He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.” “Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?” “Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said."

"“They call themselves the light.” “What about it?” “If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?” “I suppose.” “If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”"

"Hell is the absence of the people you long for."

"Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true?"

"Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor."

"Twenty-third Street wasn’t busy—a little early for the lunch crowd—but he kept getting trapped behind iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens."

"She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her."

"“My secret is, I hate people,” the woman said, very sincerely, and for the first time Mirella liked her. “All people?” “All except maybe like three,” she said."

"The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week."

"“Hell is other actors,” Kirsten said. “Also ex-boyfriends.”"

"The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he’s been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now."

"It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom."