Paula > Paula's Quotes

“Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad...”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a small medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman...”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“You can't go yet, not without telling us what all's happened to you since we saw you last."
I faked amnesia, nearly killed Alan Turing, got knocked unconscious by a collapsing wall, faked my own death, and met the Queen.
"It's a long story," he said.”
― Connie Willis, All Clear

“To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He'd have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?”
― K.J. Parker, The Last Witness

“Translated ‘Non omnia possumus omnus’ as ‘No possums allowed on the omnibus.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control. ”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.”
― Elizabeth Peters

“The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal - or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog

“Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Mummy Case

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport". Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (...) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of the Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not".”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.”
― Cleveland Amory, The Cat Who Came for Christmas

“He sighed deeply: to fall in love at first sight with this malodorous sleeping girl, with, as far as he could see, no pretensions to beauty or even good looks, was something he had not expected. But falling in love, he had always understood, was unpredictable, and, as far as he was concerned, irrevocable That they hadn't exchanged a word, nor spoken, made no difference. He, heart whole until that minute, and with no intention of marrying until it suited him, had lost that same heart.”
― Betty Neels

“Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.”
― Ted Key

“I'm not a heroine, I just play heroines. Also psychotics, vamps, orphans, hookers, housewives, and ”on one memorable occasionâ ”a singing rutabaga. It was never my ambition to utilize my extensive dramatic training by playing a musical vegetable. However, as my agent is so fond of pointing out, there are more actors in New York than there are people in most other cities. Translation: Beggars can't be choosers.”
― Laura Resnick, Disappearing Nightly

“How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior.”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
― Stephen King

“Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.”
― Joe Haldeman

“When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]”
― Anne Bishop, Heir to the Shadows