prcardi > prcardi's Quotes

“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

“it made him want to sing hymns he'd never even heard before”
― Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son

“[He] had riposted with the proper metaphysical statements, yet he was disturbed.”
― Robert Silverberg, Tower of Glass

“I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me it might entail privation and suffering.”
― Iain M. Banks

“When in Rome; burn it.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Earth

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.”
― James K. Morrow, Blameless in Abaddon

“There was an otherworldly quality about him, the aura of one privy to secret communiques in forgotten languages.”
― James K. Morrow, The Eternal Footman

“I wanted a real diary, but there wasn't time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you're an 'Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate.' When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you're a man I can trust.”
― James K. Morrow, Towing Jehovah

“Do you realize there was a time when the United States of America actually made sense? A time when you could look at a Norman Rockwell painting of a GI peeling potatoes for Mom and get all choked up and nobody'd laugh at you?”
― James K. Morrow, Towing Jehovah

“For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Annals of the Heechee

“at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Thrower started toward them at a trot, then remembered his dignity and walked the rest of the way. There was nothing in the gospels to imply that the Lord ever ran– only walked, as befitted his high station. Of course, Paul had his comments about running a good race, but that was allegory. A minister was supposed to be a shadow of Jesus Christ, walking in His way and representing Him to the people. It was the closest these people would ever come to beholding the majesty of God. It was Reverend Thrower's duty to deny the vitality of his youth and walk at the reverent pace of an old man, though he was only twenty-four.”
― Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son

“His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“And she has always gotten very angry at people who won’t play the roles she puts them in.”
― Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor

“An individualist—a man who has no intention of ever exploring the goals of others because he has no intention of compromising with his own—may become: (a) a hermit of limited goals, (b) a tyrant surrounded by slaves with rebellion in his future and covert hostility in his present.”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that”
― Clifford D. Simak, Time Is the Simplest Thing

“The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much”
― Robert Charles Wilson, Axis

“[H]e dreamed things for which he had no words.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, Axis

“I am told that our chroniclers' practice of inventing speeches for great persons whose lives they write is unscholarly.”
― Poul Anderson, The High Crusade

“If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.”
― Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son

“A woman stood in front of her with the peculiar poise that comes before the discovery of age and after the loss of innocence.”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“for a purpose without reason”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“[O]ld enough to be wise yet young enough to be willing to partake in an arduous crusade.”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.”
― Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite

“A world no longer of haves and have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War