Science Fiction Quotes - Page 19

I take it you know my companion?"Oh,yes!" said Savage, his smile disappearing. "We know all about Ruby Journey. Please don't let her kill anyone important. Or set fire to anything."Your reputation precedes you," Random said dryly to Ruby.

All I was trying to do when they caught me was bury my mother in an unmarked grave.

Approach everything with a careful tongue. - Elder God from The Thousand Years War

We walk in dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for the One. We die for the One. -- the Ranger oath

When all else fails, use the pen.EMW

You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way." -The Wheel, John Wtndham

He stood over her for a time, simply looking at her as he willed himself to climb into bed, and he knew doing so would make it utterly impossible to hate her. She looked so innocent and vulnerable as she dreamt, and it was difficult to hate someone once you had seen them sleeping.

What?" The dread in her tone told Rob she knew what. "How much longer?""Thirty seconds."She laughed with a panicked urgency. "I just tried to nod. I can't feel my body, but I keep reaching for it, you know?"Rob nodded, feeling guilty he was able to."How about this? I'll just tell you when I'm nodding, or shaking my head, or punching you.""Oh, no," Rob laughed, "are you planning on punching me often?""We'll see."Rob couldn't help glancing at the timer, though he knew it would only make Winter more aware of what was about to happen. Seven seconds."I keep expecting this to get easier, taht it will start to feel as if I'm going to sleep. But it doesn't. Maybe it's not possible to get used to dying."Rob reached out to comfort her, then remembered it was forbidden and drew back. If not for the surveillance, Rob would have reached under the silver cover and taken her hand, cold and stiff as it would have been.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices.

Well, for one, you walk around like you’re so much better than everyone else. We’re all a bunch of soulless animals or somethin’ in your eyes, I guess. You’re the high and mighty one and I ain’t fit to drink your piss.

Veins stood out in her temples as she struggled against her silence. No one noticed. Those words had already been used up, spent, thrown out into the atmosphere to dissipate without effect.

There comes a time when a man has to kill his own snakes.

But I assure you, a government that is willing to put their own children in danger, their own future, just to see their potential, is twisted. We do not grab babies, newborns, and throw them out of windows just to see if they sprout wings.

Quinn dropped her hand and avoided Thalcu’s eye. “I . . . I don’t want to kill you,” she said to the floor. “Not if I could save you.”The woman smiled gently at Quinn, her lips curling behind her oxygen mask. “I will not really die,” she said, drawing Quinn’s surprised gaze. She looked at Quinn contently a moment and went on, “Do you know how worlds are born? From the first breath of a star. We are made of starlight. We can not bear to look into the sun, into the thing that birthed us, anymore than we can bear to look upon our parents in the throes of passion. It is our point of origin, and to it, we all must return.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Crushed sandstone sifted through Caleb’s fingers, insubstantial as dust. A breeze caught the debris mid-fall and spirited it away before it could join the ashes blanketing the ground. He stopped in the middle of what had once been a street, his arms pulled in at his sides, his fists balled in barely restrained fury.

It's better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world--in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind--can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.

So I’m alone. I have no one. Is that what you’re telling me?” - Junco, Range (to be published April 2013)

What do you think it is that makes a man"I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words."It is not!" he said. "A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?" ..."Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him.""A soul?" I suggested."No... souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean.

Frown deepening, Jared bounces a hand off the chair arm. 'You know you're different, Princess. And it's not just because you're some fancy, spoiled rich girl. Hell, you don't smell like anyone else. Money can't buy that smell.' I assume he wasn't talking about my expensive perfume, which money did in fact buy.

Everything is About To Change.

A metric fuckton of dumb so epically mind-destroyingly beyond a bad idea that there's not a chance they would go there.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois.

Brother Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? ...I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!

Mother Nature is a bitch.

So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.'She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.

Spader and I were nearly killed. Three times. We were also robbed and witnessed a gruesome murder. Happy birthday to me!

You look like you’ve been on a month-long bender. Have you?”“No, Ken, I have not. I’ve just had a long week.” Walked the streets of a city bathed in blood and stood amid a hundred thousand corpses. Negotiated a three-way peace treaty among opposing factions of a warring alien species who’d previously held me captive. Bullied the Metigen leadership into doing my bidding. Found out we’re not the real humans, and the real humans are currently enslaving the real universe. Oh, and I think I’m addicted to my ship. How was your week? “Nothing a shower and some food won’t fix.

Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place.

So many people want to, they need to villainize others. They need a clear bad guy who suffers the consequences of violating their morality. But isn’t this the essence of intolerance?

Remember Ping-fa, Sun Tzu,’ Art of War—read between the lines: kick ass and take names later.”MadStargirl

Your desire for vengeance will cause countless deaths, child,” she said, pointing a crooked finger at Rhylie. “Innocents will be caught up in your maelstrom, their lives torn apart. People you have never met, and will never know will die beneath your shadow if you do not stop. You tear the galaxy asunder with each step you take towards Vorcia.

Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before.

Suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn't lead to truth.

The journey is the reward.

Change happens very slow and very sudden.

All his senses screamed in warning, the very air reeking of forbidden magic, but duty call him forward.

If her daughter’s ship had been disintegrated in space there would never be evidence of it, never an answer to what had happened to her.If she stopped to ponder the implications she might break. And Admiral Miriam Solovy did not break.

Is this neuro-bot really supposed to be her, this creature, this thing, compiled of the ghosts of human data, the replicas of their past?

A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business Schoolfound that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annualincome. -- from "Eugene

There was a tempest brewing in his eyes that I wasn’t sure I would survive if I stayed in his gaze too long. But he told me with his sure hold that I could trust him and not to run before I’d given him a chance to show him what it was like to ride out the storm.

What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? 'Are you talking about my community? You didn't even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God's gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That's your solution? Time travel is easier than passing affordable child care?tJennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blame so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens face by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead.tThe same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.

Mortal has not been a habitable place for a long time. We have been trying to survive patching it but one day it will break completely. Twinmortal is the future for all of us. You will achieve that future for us by learning has much as you can.

I have been to the speed of God, sir...and I discommend it.

Daniel, I was asked of a budding author, how do you know if your story is on track? My answer: I start by knowing my intention, my target. Then, with purpose, I write the scene that unfolds before me, as faithfully as is human. - Daniel LaMonte

I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted... hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first century Big Brother, take care of the rest.In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college - a sarcastic old bastard - who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

Some of them are mech,” said Zita, nimbly picking her high heels through the steaming pools of red goo and severed, wriggling limbs. She was splattered with blood and grinning as she came to them, but she frowned to see the utter bafflement on Rose’s face. “Hey, snap out of it. Haven’t you seen mech before?” She kicked a man’s severed head, and Rose gasped when his face slid off, revealing a skull of gleaming silver metal.Rose shook her head. “Mech are illegal. The government s-said they feared a robot war!” she insisted, turning to follow as Zita limped past her.Zita laughed dryly, folding up her rifle and tucking it under her skirt. “Is it so hard to imagine your government lied? Governments tend to do that.

Cale! Have you had a female in here?”Calic laughed carelessly. “Depends on when you're referring to.

I stare at the long, almost elegant thinness of the wrist bone jutting out from a heap of flesh and cloth. All that separates us, that poor woman and me, is an accident of birth.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.You'd scream if you had the breath.Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

You can only rise so far by climbing on others’ shoulders, you know.

They hate you.""Why?""Cause you're a dick, Mitch.

Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It'll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods' worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as the must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.

Whatever you do, don’t make it worse by trying to come up with some flimsy excuse for why you were in the ventilation shaft, Lina told herself.

It’s getting a little chilly in here! Why don’t we sit by the fireplace and I’ll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys!