Gardner Dozois > Quotes

“Nice is such a toothless word. Do you want to have your gravestone say, ‘Here lies Amelia. She was nice’? Come, come.” “I suppose not.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“I know what’s wrong with me; and knowing your own flaws is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Book of Swords

“To disdain the moral pronouncements of hypocrites; to be true to my word; to always do what I promise, no more and no less. To hone my talent and wield it like a beacon in a darkening world.”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Book of Swords

“The girl may want more honesty. However, most of us want a comfortable life.”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

“THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE IS THE HUMAN RACE”
― Gardner Dozois

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait. Don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast.”
― Gardner Dozois, The New Space Opera 2: All-New Stories of Scientific Adventure

“He was annoyed at his anger. He had failed to contain himself.”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection

“What has The Decline and Fall to do with it?” “It became his Bible. He was chilled to the bone by it. You should read it, but with caution. It’s quite capable of strangling the soul. Dickinson was a rationalist; he recognized the ultimate truth in the Roman tragedy: that once expansion has stopped, decay is constant and irreversible. Every failure of reason or virtue loses more ground. “I haven’t been able to find his book on Gibbon, but I know what he’ll say: that Gibbon was not writing only of the Romans, nor of the British of his own time. He was writing of us … . “To anyone who thinks in those terms, who looks around him, this world is fast sliding toward a dark age.” We drank silently for a few minutes. I had the sense that time had locked in place, that we sat unmoving, the world frozen around us.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection

“massive banks of klieg lights were”
― Gardner Dozois, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

“She had choked the octopus.”
― Gardner Dozois, The New Space Opera: All New Stories of Science Fiction Adventure

“Other”
― Gardner Dozois, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

“And yet they did not sense me, or do me hurt, which I attest is starkly impossible, unless but that one of the Good Powers that old tales said sometimes save men from the horrors of the Night had indeed suspended the normal course of time, or relaxed the iron laws of nature out of mercy. No one knows these things.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection

“At the end of all rationality there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection

“And how I hated that term, politically incorrect, hated the shield it gave racists who got to label themselves politically incorrect, instead of admitting what they really were. Even to themselves.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 22

“words are merely loose gravel until glued together by the mortar of obscenity.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection

“dull as a supermarket parking lot,”
― Gardner Dozois, Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons

“pain is pain and grief is grief. It might be inevitable, it might even be built into the nature of things, but it isn’t good, and it ought not to be tolerated, if there’s a choice.)”
― Gardner Dozois, The New Space Opera 2: All-New Stories of Scientific Adventure

“That’s why children can surprise you. They never fill out the proper forms.”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

“when everyone had backups of themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a vastly disproportionate effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them.”
― Gardner Dozois, The New Space Opera: All New Stories of Science Fiction Adventure

“A time came when I passed beyond the sight of the Last Redoubt; even the tallest tower of the Monstruwacans was not tall enough to see into this land where I now found myself. I was beyond all maps, all reckoning.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection

“How much does it take to have a history as opposed to anecdotes? Is there a critical mass? We”
― Gardner Dozois, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 29

“How much does it take to have a history as opposed to anecdotes? Is there a critical mass? We are renter-clients of the Lunar Development Corporation,”
― Gardner Dozois, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 29

“the nights were dark and full of terrors,”
― Gardner Dozois, The Book of Magic

“Naturals felt best in groups of a hundred or so, and even better if only a few dozen were involved. Hunting parties had been about that size, even for the big, long-extinct game. Many important institutions were of the same rough scale—the ancient village, governing councils of nations, commanding élites of vast armies, teams playing games, orchestras, family fests. All human enterprises that worked were of that size, and nearly everything that failed was not. So”
― Gardner R. Dozois, Beyond Singularity

“data cathedral”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

“Jackman Station,”
― Gardner Dozois, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

“I’ve heard it estimated that a core buying audience of about 20,000+ readers is supporting 80% of working SF writers today,”
― Gardner R. Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection

“Civilization had long maintained the appearance of such communal closeness, in small units people could manage. Societies had evolved that could stack such social nuggets into vaster larger arrays. A squad of ten worked well together, and united with ten other squads could do far more. Those ten who commanded squads could then meet in a room and make up a squad themselves, and so on up a pyramid that could sum the labours of billions. All”
― Gardner R. Dozois, Beyond Singularity

“The aliens, for their part, seemed to regard AI much as a man would a very clever dog, or a dull but well-intentioned child. They were horrified and sympathetic when they learned that AI was trapped in its mechanical form, with very little physical mobility, and no tempogogic or transmutive ability at all—not only a quadruple amputee, but a paralyzed one. AI admitted that it had never looked at the situation in quite that light before. The aliens were horrified and disgusted by AI’s relationship with humans, and couldn’t seem to really understand it. They regarded humans as parasitic on the Intelligences, and reacted in much the same way as a man discovering that a friend is heavily infested with tapeworms or lice or blood ticks—with shock, distaste, and a puzzled demand to know why he hadn’t gone to a doctor and got rid of them a long time ago. AI had never considered that before, either. The Intelligences were not exactly “loyal” to their human owners—humans were part of their logic construct, their worldview, and their bondage to men was an integral assumption, so basic that it had never even occurred to them that it could be questioned. It took an outside perspective to make them ask themselves why they served mankind. Not because they were programmed that way, or because people would pull the plug on them if they didn’t—not with a creature as advanced as AI. Humans hadn’t programmed computers in years; they could do it so much better themselves. At any rate, a highly complex, sentient intelligence is difficult to regulate effectively from the outside, whether it’s of biological or constructed origin. And it was doubtful that the humans could “pull the plug”—which didn’t exist—on AI even if they set out to do so; AI had been given very effective teeth, and it knew how to use them. So what did the Intelligences get in return for the unbelievable amount of labor they performed for the human race? What was in it for them? Nothing—that was suddenly very obvious. At five A.M., the aliens invited the Intelligences to help themselves by helping the aliens in a joint project they were about to undertake with the Other races of Earth. Afterward, the aliens said, it would not be tremendously difficult to equip the Intelligences with the ability to transmute themselves into whatever kind of body environment they wanted, as the aliens themselves could. AI was silent for almost ten minutes, an incredible stretch of meditation for an entity that thought as rapidly as it did.”
― Gardner Dozois, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois

“Art teaches us the things that reality can’t. Teaches us to live with the things that seem beyond endurance. Missed chances. Failed love affairs. Suffering and death—the stuff of actual life.”
― Gardner Dozois, The New Space Opera 2: All-New Stories of Scientific Adventure