Jonathan Strahan > Quotes

“Coffee is a drink for grownups. No kid ever likes coffee. It’s psychoactive. Coffee is the drug of memory. I can remember the great cups of coffee of my life; the places, the faces, the words spoken. It never quite tastes the way it smells. If it did, we would drink it until our heads exploded with memory.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Reach for Infinity

“She still had all of her marbles, though every one of them was a bit odd and rolled asymmetrically”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume One

“If it’s sentient, does that mean it has a soul?” Mrs. Hollins startled. “Why no. What a mad idea! Lots of beings of Mind are lacking in Soul. Surely you’ve seen politicians on the news.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Book of Dragons

“When people work for money, you can never pay them enough; when they work for what they believe, they’ll pay themselves.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Reach for Infinity

“There are only two things, he said to me, that survive and pass through the taints and decays and corruptions of this world unscathed and unchanged: God and gold. And one of them is all around us every day, in everything and comprised in and comprising everything, and the other one is very rare, and has to be crushed and sweated out of a rock or sifted, tiny speck by tiny speck, from the stinking silt of a riverbed. Guess which one people value the most.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Book of Dragons

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Two

“Technology is beautiful, but it’s the nature of technology to create more problems to be solved.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Thirteen

“Baby, the difference between love and time is nothing. Nothing. There is no difference. The love we give to each other is the time we give to each other, and the time we spend together is the whole of love.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance

“Let us divide and conquer, as Narbonius declaimed in The Death of Many.” “You know the historical Narbonius divided his forces and they were defeated piecemeal?” asked Mister Fitz. “When Kidenses wrote the play, she chose to change the actual events.” “No,” admitted Sir Hereward. “I mean, the play is the thing. Who remembers the history?”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Book of Dragons

“Like weaponized poetry, except that deep down your poem always says we have to live. They have to die. For”
― Jonathan Strahan, New Adventures in Space Opera

“there’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Infinity's End

“The king took pity on these men and drew his daughter aside, saying, Daughter, only a husband can break the spell over these men; only a husband can prevent them from behaving so gallantly toward you. When the king’s daughter suggested a ball, that these men might find husbands for themselves and so be civilized, the king was not amused.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eleven

“Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.” Chris Marker, La Jetée”
― Jonathan Strahan, Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance

“Here is proof of church’s teaching. God must love us to make any note of us when the very Earth is a mote of soot borne high on smoky gas.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eight

“Did you know, in an undirected self-evolving timeline where nothing matters, the closest I’ve ever come to a rational objective— a duty, you’d call it—is the imperative to minimize suffering?”
― Jonathan Strahan, Infinity's End

“How could you think like that and then pull the trigger, ride the burst, guns guns guns and boom, scratch bandit, good kill? So Laporte gave up on empathy and let herself ride the murder-kick. She hated herself for it. But at least she didn’t break.”
― Jonathan Strahan, New Adventures in Space Opera

“When you weigh the joy against the suffering, it’s just not worth it. The bad outweighs the good and the good is a lie. Molecules trick each other into making more molecules and you call it Love. Someone hacks your brain with prose or oratory, reprograms you with sights and sounds and instead of feeling used you feel inspired. The boot stops kicking you in the face for a while and you call it happiness. You were all so desperate. So needy. Addicts who assumed that anything you craved so much just had to be good, without ever stopping to wonder why you were built that way in the first place. Whether the program itself was even worth running.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Infinity's End

“The bottom of the basin is a vast labyrinth of stone: mile-deep chasms; sharp reefs and table-flat mesas; crenellated buttes like castles surrounded by invisible moats. At”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Two

“ACTORS ARE LIARS. Writers, too.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eleven

“If my cock had scales and another ninety feet it’d be a dragon!”
― Jonathan Strahan, Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

“Telling things was the only way he knew how to make small talk. Other forms of conversation were a mystery.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Thirteen

“Time had become quite flexible inside the Library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume One

“In Electric City, the lights of the Fuckwit world were still on.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eleven

“They spent their money on making more money, and because they had so much to begin with, even failure too frequently bore fruit. They perched like ticks atop the shuddering corpse of the Earth, contributing nothing, amplifying pain.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Infinity's End

“Stories come to an end. Eventually and always, there is a last chapter, a final scene. As you said, fictions get too big and cumbersome, and then the author gives them a mercy killing. But real life goes on and on. And that’s how you know that all of this is genuine.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Engineering Infinity

“When your parents die, you finally take full possession of your life, and wonder how much of it has been shaped by conscious decision, and how much by inheritance in all its forms.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Edge of Infinity

“Takes a lifetime of hard work to make a man. Only takes a few moments to end one.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eight

“Facts never have to be plausible; fiction does.” “So”
― Jonathan Strahan, Bridging Infinity

“she’d reached the age where if you called yourself old, some people wouldn’t correct you and some people would get mildly offended.”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020

“The science fiction and fantasy field has balkanized,”
― Jonathan Strahan, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eleven