Science Fiction Quotes - Page 9

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else's words and notes.

Sometimes he’d dream of hunting for Adam the Usurper twenty years in the future, or of Doctor Simmons sending Aero to burrow into his head and steal his most secret thoughts and desires.

I learned as a kid that homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. For one thing, it’s easier. And there’s something satisfying about knowing somebody else is the bad guy and seeing them laid out on the street in front of you. Something human.Microbes? The little bastards just go hide, multiply, and come back to bite you when you least expect it.

Originally it had had two settings: Stun and Kill. These had proved inadequate against the ridiculously well-armored skin of monsters from particularly rough planets, so I'd found a way to tinker with the built-in limitations. The dial now had a third setting, labeled with the handwritten words 'Solve All Immediate Problems.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on.

The monsters don't live in the belly of the world like they all say. The monsters live inside of us. We make the monsters.

A place without meaning is no place to be.

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words — if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night — do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?

When I think of war, I see blood. Pain and suffering. Nothing good comes from war.But there is good. There will be an outcome. One side will find peace, solace. While the other will end in bitter loss.There are two sides to the coin of war.

We live in the most epic of fantasy worlds.

By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.I am the one who wakes up in the morning.Always.Every morning.I don’t die.I just become increasingly unlikely.

We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams.

Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’shandwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.

It was as unsatisfying as a handjob from someone wearing an oven mitt.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible

Junk?” Lina repeated, incredulous. Oh, she wasn’t about to let that pass.

Music can make you feel things that aren’t yours—sadness, or love, or joy. A good song has a magic to it. It pulls you in and the feelings in the music take over and you become the music, you become the song.

Hey, I said we don't carry weapons, I didn't say we couldn't defend ourselves." Captain Stanley Memphis, head of alien team disguised as pint-sized critters on a quest to learn if humans are savage bastards or a benevolent tribe.

He was pale as only one state on Bhast dictated—not lacking color necessarily or vitality, certainly. Fey white was more comparable to a pearl; the color subtle and the luster soft, but still vibrant. In spite of the tragedy that could come with it, it was not a dying state. It was a state of living…sometimes much more brilliantly than people could cope with, including the Fey individuals themselves.

All unnatural control systems have a key element in their intricate composition – the fatality that they will naturally collapse.

I may not have believed in lady luck, but I believed in her fucking sister, irony. That bitch was out to nail me to wall." ~ Caleb

This is more than an experience in the shadows of sleep.

Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the process of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks. Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does.

The Quetzal Motel was a father/daughter operation, and they hurt for money but with just enough to stay in groceries. But who could tell? After tonight, their fortunes might perk up. It was better to look on the bright side. She took a deep breath and plunged back into Philip Nostrum’s realm of futuristicdoings.

If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it." narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19

Good,” said the First Speaker. “And tell me, what do you think of all this. A finished work of art, is it not?”“Definitely!”“Wrong! It is not.” This, with sharpness. “It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.

Front grace in the shadows

Sighing, he settled into his chair, watching the vision of space at his front. It was stoic, calm, and never ending—deadly, if you weren't careful.

You’re covered in blood again.”“I really am.” “Why are you always covered in blood when I wake up after being unconscious?” “Usually for the same reason you were unconscious, I think.

Mia stood between the bed and the broken window, holding an active plasma blade at waist-height in front of her. A thick coat of blood stained the plasma nearly from hilt to tip, hissing as it dribbled from blade to floor.“Are you all right?”Mia gave her a wan, distant smile. “It’s okay. I’ve done it before.

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it?

The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.

As for you Rose Tyler you gave up on me! That's rude. Is all I am rude and not ginger?" The Doctor

No, we absolutely should do it. If we can capture such a motherlode, it could make a pivotal difference in the coming war. We need it. AEGIS needs it, my mother needs it. This is why we’re here.“I’m merely pausing at the precipice of the cliff, peeking down into the chasm and asking, ‘Are we sure?’ So…” Alex eyed him wearing an uneasy grimace “…are we sure?

I have knowledge; I'm responsible. If I sit by and do nothing while I have the ability to change, to help, then I'm just as much a criminal as any. Power begets responsibility...You should know that.

The rulers were using ancient knowledge to manipulate the amygdaloidal primal fear. They ruled through fear, preternatural fear created through soft, invisible waves designed to alternate the brain’s almond. They kept the people spellbound

I have a hard time trusting a person without a couple of murders on his record, Mr. Draedax.

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.

A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets."Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now.

It would be either a very skilled or very unwise man to steal from an assassin.” - Taliesin

May the gods ignore you.

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.

Death. Life. They are in the air, the water, the earth, and the fire that surround us. They co-mingle like a dance of weeping and rejoicing. The joy and pain become one. We are of a dualistic nature." ---Jennifer Mills

What's a Laster? A dead man.

What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history... We would be hard put to defend the use of the term 'imaginary' then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an 'imaginary' voice telling him to sail west, or a 'real' voice telling him the idea was hopeless?

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.

The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of the future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

History is written by the survivors.

Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop.

Science is the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.8 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two).

War makes monsters of us all. But what happens to those of us who no longer wish to be monsters?

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

Never own more than you can carry in both hands at a dead run.

We both knew the place we were at and what that meant. We both felt the regret and the loss. We both knew that without me, none of it would have been possible. Without me, everything would be different. Without me, we wouldn't have been there... lying in that bed in the first place.

That’s when I notice Cheryl and Mickey cuddled up on the couch. She’s leaning on his shoulder, his arm around her, her leg across his lap. Cheryl throws glances at Kerry that say, “Look at me!” while Kerry shoots a “You go, girl!” smirk right back. I think of CK, how he and I often sat like that. Not because we were seconds from making out or wanted to look like a couple, but just out of a deep, platonic connection. My heart hits a higher notch on the ache-o-meter, my teeth sear into my bottom lip, and then something inside me snaps as cleanly as a crayon.

When I look at my bookcase and see the books upon the shelves, I think to myself, There is a God.

RIDE A WHITE SWAN""Ride it on out like a bird in the skyway,Ride it on out like you were a bird,Fly it all out like an eagle in a sunbeam,Ride it all out like you were a bird.Wear a tall hat like the druid in the old daysWear a tall hat and a Tattooed gownRide a white swan like the people of the Beltane,Wear your hair long,babe,you can't go wrong.Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead,Say a few spells and baby,there you go,Take a black cat and sit it on your shoulder,And in the morning you'll know all you know.Wear a tall hat like the druid in the old daysWear a tall hat and a Tattooed gownRide a white swan like the people of the Beltane,Wear your hair long, babe ,you can't go wrong.Da di di da, da di di da