Colum Slevin > Colum's Quotes

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Envy thou not the oppressor, And choose none of his ways. —Proverbs 3:31”
― James Ellroy, Perfidia

“Miller slapped the magazine back into his gun and chambered a round. “I’m guessing there’s a lot more people need to be shot before this is over,” he”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. ”
― Frank Herbert

“If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“When artists work well, they connect people to themselves, and they stitch people to one another, through this shared experience of discovering a connection that wasn’t visible before. Have you ever noticed that this looks like this? And with the same delight that we took as children in seeing a face in a cloud, grown-up artists draw the lines between the bigger dots of grown-up life: sex, love, vanity, violence, illness, death.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“I didn’t think to mention that if he wanted more women in leadership roles, perhaps we should start by hiring more women. I didn’t note that even if we did hire more women, there were elements of our office culture that women might find uncomfortable. Instead, I told him I would do whatever he needed.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“The girl was bright and possessed a wry wit. Definitely not a prized combination in anyone under thirty.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All: Stories

“At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Suddenly my cellphone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the screen. A message from Riva, just one word: RUN A low rumbling hum caught my ear and I looked up the road to see a trio of cars, low and dark, no headlights, just making the turn towards me. RUN”
― David Demchuk, The Bone Mother

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems

“virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn’t they be?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“I can see my glass is half full … but, of course, I did order a double.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Tales From A Broad: An Unreliable Memoir

“To touch the Bloody-Nine was to touch death, and death has no favourites, and makes no exceptions. The Bloody-Nine rose up, shoving the great corpse away from him, and his red fist closed tight around the giant’s sword, a heavy length of star-bright metal, dark and beautiful, a righteous tool for the work that awaited him. So much work.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“He had murdered the heir to the throne of the Union with his own hands. He had risen, by a stroke of chance that verged on the impossible, to one of the highest posts in the nation. Busy year.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“I’m not into success as a metric.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future