Matt Shaw > Matt's Quotes

“But in time nothing can be without becoming.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Fish cannot carry guns.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“That's all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It's always open to revision. Yesterday's fact is today's question and tomorrow has an answer we don't know yet.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“Home isn’t always a place is it?”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“It wasn't real conservatism at all, of course, but an unthought longing for the dear old days when one could predict what would be there tomorrow, if not next week. Unable to get the big picture, they welcomed the conveniences, the miniaturization of this and the speed of that, and then they were angrily confused when their support of these things changed their world.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X

“I discover that waiting may be accomplished in divers ways. And stillness has many . . . appearances, as does warmth.”
― R.A. MacAvoy, Tea with the Black Dragon

“We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, Spin

“You can do impulsive, reckless things completely sober. Or, well, I could, when I was young.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“They were happy because they didn't have enough imagination to look ahead, he thought, and anyone who tried to tell them there were dangers was by definition an enemy of the community.”
― Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

“Why, they're the dirtiest guys in any town. They're the same ones that burned the houses of old German people during the war. They're the same ones that lynch Negroes. They like to be cruel. They like to hurt people, and they always give it a nice name, patriotism or protecting the constitution.”
― John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle

“Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only "What we wish we'd done," rather than "How we actually did it.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race

“But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you’re fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.”
― Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three

“There are lots of different stories branching away all the time from every single thing that happens. As soon as a moment has gone, different versions of it start to be remembered and told about. And some of them carry on, and some die out, and you can't know in advance which version will last and which won't.”
― Chris Beckett, Dark Eden

“To return from the dead is a bit like riding a bike, or unfastening a girl's bra with a single hand. It's all a question of getting the knack.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“When people treat you like a monster, you start to act like one.”
― Molly Knox Ostertag, The Hidden Witch

“Maybe I can be what someone good believes I am. Maybe that's what faith is.”
― Sterling Watson, Night Letter

“No one insists a corpse is still alive or a bird is still an egg but somehow a man is always what he used to be, and if he takes charge of his future people say he's not himself, that they don't know him anymore.”
― Personne, Traitor Comet

“Monsters never die. They are reborn from the chaos and barbarism that is always bubbling underneath civilization . . . they must be defeated again and again, kept at bay.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters