Walter Jon Williams > Quotes

“I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.”
― Walter Jon Williams

“if a person of authority talks only to those who agree with him he soon finds himself out of authority.

Luke”
― Walter Jon Williams, Destiny's Way

“If you wish to find the unclouded truth, he told himself, do not concern yourself with right or wrong. Conflicts with right and wrong are a sickness of the mind. The”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“I hate it!" he said. "I don't want to be human anymore."
"Neither do I," she said. "It's not a good place to be.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“Terror skittered around the fringes of his consciousness on fast rodent feet.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“Gabriel knew that he had let himself in for a certain amount of ridicule when he decided to allow himself to be worshiped. In the end he decided that the precedent of actually forbidding a religion was more distasteful than being plagued by the devout.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Rogues

“I can't help but wonder how the old Empire would have handled the crisis. I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey'lya's policy if I understood it correctly as a policy of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests."

"That's not what the Empire would have done Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors or some other mistake and a hotshot enemy pilot would have dropped a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."

Dorja Han”
― Walter Jon Williams, Destiny's Way

“I have no sword, Steward thought, and the thought was triumphant. From the state which is above and beyond, from thought I make my sword.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“Why do I feel that ghosts are more real
Than these creatures of substance and matter?
Why does their song seem to drive me along
More than humanity’s drivel and pratter?”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“He put the point of the knife against what he thought was the cricothyroid membrane, steadied it with the right hand, then slammed the butt with his left palm.

Pain shrieked through him as the knife went in. Blood spurted over his hands. He hoped he hadn't hit the carotid artery--local variation in the throat was considerable, and blood vessels were tricky.

He still couldn't breath. Panic flailed in him and he slapped the butt of the knife again, as hard as he could.

He felt the point strike the back of his throat, gagged, felt more pain. He took a grip on the grainy plastic handle of the knife and twisted, felt cartilage grind as he forced it apart--

--and he breathed. Blood spattered as the long, full breath whistled out. He gurgled as he breathed in.

[...]

When he felt ready he got to his feet. He found a fork and jabbed the tines into his incision, then twisted to keep it open. His lungs kept going into spasm in an attempt to cough the obstruction out.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“If the Force is life and the Yuuzhan Vong are alive and you cannot see them in the Force then is the problem with the Yuuzhan Vong or is it with your perceptions

Vergere to Luke”
― Walter Jon Williams, Destiny's Way

“If only the heart’s advice were infallible.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan

“It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“SuTopo was less a person than a presence, a calm source of authority, like a reigning monarch. Aside”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“Curzon stood up. He gestured with a fist. “I don’t want you to think about anything,” he said. “I want you to feel. Feel the rightness of this. The correctness of this vision. The necessity of it.” Steward could see patches of sweat under Curzon’s arms. “I want you to sense, Steward, that this is something worth having.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“Steward felt closest to Reese. However cautious they were, however little they knew each other, there was a friendship there, a mutual respect. Steward was careful not to presume on it, to tread on Reese’s privacy. That, he concluded, was what friends did. *”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“Computer cores made of liquid crystal that can re-form itself into any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and the altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis. Hearts that can make minds, from little bits if brightness in Cowboy's skull that let him move his panzer, to large models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Without knowledge you cannot choose wisely. And without wise choice, there is no freedom.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“Gabriel flashed him the one-fingered Mudra of Contempt.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“Earth, the startlingly pure blue and white, the brown and silver snakes that are rivers filled with erosion, the fragmented coastlines where the rising seas are eating the land, just as Earth’s remaining resources are being eaten by the population. Soon the population may be the only resource left. The Orbitals were once their hope, a gateway to new resources. Now the Orbitals stand like a wall between Earth and its broken dreams, claiming the future for their own. Reno”
― Walter Jon Williams, Solip:System

“When you revealed that the Rani was in fact the Nagi," Charlie said, "the players collectively pissed their pants."
"I'd rather they creamed their jeans.”
― Walter Jon Williams, This is Not a Game

“The fighting is never over,” she says. “All truces are temporary. All wars are the same war, with occasional pauses for readjustment. War and politics are different facets of the same phenomenon, which is the conflict of human will, the will for power, for greatness, for enlarged scope. . . . The rest, the medium through which one will challenges another — war or peace, law or politics — that is mere mechanics.” Her green eyes glitter. “Learn that if you wish to survive.”
― Walter Jon Williams, City on Fire

“Thin streams of blood ran in artistic patterns. “Pulling toenails serves the Destinarian philosophy?” he asked. Ardala shrugged. “Demonstrates the fragility of flesh as opposed to hardware. I’m going to take a bath.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“Computer cores made if liquid crystal that can re-form itself into any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and the altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis.Hearts that can make minds, from little bits if brightness in Cowboy's skull that let him move his panzer, to large models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Moving like a rat in its maze. Programmed. Performing a function that it was not capable of understanding, on behalf of people whose entire existence was outside its knowledge, detected only as feet occasionally planted in its way.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Voice of the Whirlwind (Author's Preferred Edition)

“it isn’t passions that make us weak, but rather uncontrollable passions.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan

“I’ll figure a way out,” he promises, and in some part of his own mind sees a monochrome image, himself and Reno, Raul and Lupe, Sarah looking as if she’s been lit by von Sternberg and bearing a resemblance to Louise Brooks, all in some improbably large delta cabin, sailing against a background of gray watercolor-wash clouds pierced by the bright swords of sunbeams, a happy silver nitrate ending glowing on the screen of Cowboy’s closed lids, and he has a feeling he can work it somehow, flick a switch and things will turn out that way, if he just knows what switch and when.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“The panzer, she decides, is a place only a junkie could love. A cozy cybernetic womb of masculine scent, soft blinking lights, the studs that feed one's addiction. Whatever Cowboy's is, she doesn't want to know.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Aristide collected memories, stringing lines of poetry like pearls on a cord.  When he called the lines to his mind, a host of memories accompanied them.  Memories which he otherwise might have lost.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces