Cli Fi Quotes

“In silent agreement we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with think rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single dark thread of water at it’s centre. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-colored pigeons. The only real color is magpipes, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actor or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.”
― Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds

“I knew that my ambivalence about the emergency annoyed her. The problem with emergencies was that the longer they went on, the more they just felt like normal life.”
― Kirsten McDougall, She's a Killer

“The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen.”
― Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

“Many fiction writers have used novels to promote social change. Why couldn’t I? No matter that I had no experience whatsoever writing fiction. I could learn. I decided on mysteries because I love the genre and could envisage a story featuring climate change researchers hounded by climate change doubters.”
― Charlene D'Avanzo, Cold Blood, Hot Sea

“If the twentieth century was shaped by warring ideologies, and the twenty-first was a battle of digital languages, our present age is defined by duelling approaches to oceanic city engineering.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“But this was Stormland. There was always another front coming remorselessly at the coast. A Category Four was coming from the mid-Atlantic, angling to cross their northward flight path. The Butcher Bird should be turned inland to try to dodge the worst of it. But NoelLeuman had insisted they stay on this course. Leuman was a stormrider.”
― John Shirley, Stormland

“The Amazon forests?” Webb asked, opening the medicine box. He looked at the label, then put a med patch on his arm. “Yes, yes, the forests. Mostly gone, turned into savannah and gold mines and palm oil plantations and beef ranches. Oh yes. The natural moisture pump is gone, don’t you know? Far more moisture gathers out over the sea instead, along with the growing heat, and that increases wind shear. And then . . . then . . . Why, the Gulf Stream weakening as the ice caps melt . . . Of course, that’s a good way north of here but it’s all one system, domino effect of weather cells, do you see . . .” His eyes lost focus; his voice drifted away.”
― John Shirley, Stormland

“You haven’t been here that long. Just wait. I don’t go for it either, but who’s in charge of Stormland, really? The perpetual storm system is! We crawl around under it hoping it doesn’t stomp us. These people feel like they’ve got to appease it. Easy to get superstitious in all that. Desperate people can go for magical thinking pretty easily, Webb.” After a thoughtful pause, he went on, “A lot of folks around here believe that one day the storms will pass. From what I’ve heard, it might take a century for the cycle to finally stop. The storm system here is—it’s like the red spot on Jupiter, with what we’ve done to the planet. The big storm had to settle somewhere.”
― John Shirley, Stormland

“While we ate, mostly in silence, I marveled at how the world worked today. Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protestors in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had lead to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“Achieving real, lasting change is much harder than firing weapons at a defined enemy,’ she said.”
― Fay Abernethy, First Contact, Second Chances

“Learning a language promoted the first tender shoots of intercultural understanding. People became familiar with previously alien concepts and, as a consequence, more open to them.”
― Fay Abernethy, First Contact, Second Chances

“He doesn't believe in the deity his brother worships, nor the one whose word Jasper Worth preaches, but he does believe in this: that every creature and every growing thing and every unique place might be its own small god.”
― Matt Bell, Appleseed