Trike > Trike's Quotes

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

“He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way.
They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained.
Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a bright-blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon at his back.
They had ridden it out, and he killed the infras, pushed back his goggles, and switched on the normal night lamps.
The desert would be bad enough, all by itself.
Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again.
To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.”
― Roger Zelazny

“The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)”
― Philip Wylie

“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)”
― Jon Stewart

“I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11”
― Walter Mosley

“If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)”
― Brandon Sanderson

“Everything I do is going to contain the message that men who are going to be comfortable with powerful women are going to be more powerful men”
― Joss Whedon

“Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.” (Wellesly High School commencement speech, “You Are Not Special”, 6-12)”
― Teacher David McCullough

“Lots of men think that women should tell the truth, explain their feelings. These men should use their wishes more wisely. (Prepare To Die!, p.27)”
― Paul Tobin, Prepare to Die!

“They’re called sock puppets. We create armies of artificial online personas – user accounts that espouse views certain interested parties want espoused. We flood forums, online comment sections, social media. ... It’s amazing what a few people and a little money can accomplish online. Our puppets have turned whole elections. … Everything the public sees is managed. If there’s a valuable brand to protect – whether it’s a person or a dish soap – these fuckers are out there protecting it, shaping the narrative. I mean… who the hell follows dish soap on Twitter? How does anyone believe that shit’s real? (p. 292-294)”
― Daniel Suarez, Kill Decision

“It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch. -- Co.Create Online, 2-14-12”
― Alan Moore

“Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found...
That's out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year....
Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one's conscience to get in the way.”
― Hugh Howey, The Unraveling

“People could say a lot of negative things about the apocalypse, but there was no arguing the air quality in Los Angeles had really improved.”
― Peter Clines, Ex-Heroes

“There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms.” (p. 12)”
― James Gurney, Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist (Volume 1)

“In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.

While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.”
― Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

“Oberon’s been kidnapped along with one of the werewolves, and that’s why we’re all so upset. We’ll talk more tomorrow, and I promise to answer all your questions if I survive the night,” I said.
The widow’s eyebrows raised. “Ye’ve got all these nasty pooches to run around with and ye still might die?”
“I’m going to go fight with a god, some demons, and a coven of witches who all want to kill me,” I said, “so it’s a distinct possibility.”
“Are y’goin’ t’kill ’em back?”
“I’d certainly like to.”
“Attaboy,” the widow chuckled. “Off y’go, then. Kill every last one o’ the bastards and call me in the mornin’.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hounded

“Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin’ me lawn and killin’ what Brits come around.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hounded

“Wow you need to get some sun.”
“Shut up. I'm Irish.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hounded

“You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense. (1949)”
― Murray Leinster, A Logic Named Joe

“Hunting hawks did not belong in cages, no matter how much a man coveted their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They were far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice

“All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.”
― Roger Ebert, Life Itself

“The Ketty Jay was staffed with drunkards and drifters, all of them running from something -- whether it be memories or enemies or the drudgery of land-bound life -- but since Yortland they'd been running in the same direction. United by that common purpose, they'd begun to turn into something resembling a crew. And Frey had begun to turn into something resembling a captain.”
― Chris Wooding, Retribution Falls

“This is kaiju!" Yojiro barked. "When did they ever give a damn about adhering to science!”
― Hiroshi Yamamoto, MM9

“I nurtured my dinomania with documentaries, delighted in the dino-themed B movies I brought home from the video store, and tore up my grandparents' backyard in my search of a perfect Triceratops nest. Never mind that the classic three-horned dinosaur never roamed central New Jersey, or that the few dinosaur fossils found in the state were mostly scraps of skeletons that had been washed out into the Cretaceous Atlantic. My fossil hunter's intuition told me there just had to be a dinosaur underneath the topsoil, and I kept excavating my pit. That is, until I got the hatchet out of my grandfather's toolshed and tried to cut down a sapling that was in my way. My parents bolted out of the house and put a stop to my excavation. Apparently, I hadn't filled out the proper permits before I started my dig.”
― Brian Switek, My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs

“To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most — that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias — 1984, as an example. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a — placid, peaceful one.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Well, I guess [2001: A Space Odyssey] legitimized [science fiction], particularly for people who looked down on science fiction; you know, the intelligentsia. My definition of the intelligentsia: someone who's educated beyond their intelligence.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I think that the people that say we will never develop computer intelligence — they merely prove that some biological systems don't have much intelligence.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“People looking for easy answers to big problems. People that blame the Jews or colored folks for all the bad things that happen to ‘em. People that can’t realize that a heck of a lot of things are bound to go wrong in a world as big as this one. And if there is any answer to why it’s that way – and there ain’t always – why, it’s probably not just one answer by itself, but thousands of answers.

But that’s the way my daddy was – like those people. They buy some books by a fella that don’t know a god-danged thing more than they do (or he wouldn’t be having to write books). And that’s supposed to set ‘em straight about everything. Or they buy themselves a bottle of pills. Or they say the whole trouble is with other folks, and the only thing to do is to get rid of ‘em. Or they claim we got to war with another country.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280