Speculative Fiction Quotes

“Let the spirits guide you, but never let them take you.”
― E.J. Stevens, Spirit Storm

“Helen dared to look up without being invited to do so. “I cannot
thank you enough for your kindness, Lady Consort.”
“Kindness had nothing to do with it. You have skills and training I
need just now, and I intend to use you shamelessly, and expose you to
greater danger.”
“Get in line, Lady Consort,” Helen replied. “Danger-filled usury
seems to be a holiday pastime in this city.”
The Consort stopped pretending to do her needlework. “I could
have you whipped for such insolence, girl.”
“Before or after you use me.”
― Candace L. Talmadge, Stoneslayer: Book One Scandal

“The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you’d never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings.”
― Alexandar Tomov, Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth

“And the minibar in my hotel room was mysteriously emptied."
"By arcane forces beyond the understanding of normal human beings?" asked Myfanwy as she sifted through the in-box. It was the sort of question you learned to ask automatically when you worked with the Checquy.
"No, it was me," admitted Shantay without a shred of embarrassment.”
― Daniel O'Malley, The Rook

“Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly!”
― Bob Bello, Sci-fi Almanac, 2010: An Anthology of Short Stories

“Millions cheer the warrior
spilling blood across the ring
while the one who stands for peace
is ridiculed and shamed.
Must hearts forever suffer
from ignorance and greed?
Can bombs heal our souls
or set our spirits free?”
― Aberjhani, Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player

“Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“Funny, they made this new genre called Speculative Fiction, I thought all fiction had always been speculative.”
― Teri Louise Kelly

“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.

Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.
And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.

The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Any beginning is also an ending, you know. You can’t have just the one.”
― Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue

“It is as it is. Betren son of Bromwell Defender of Delmarath”
― Cynthia Willerth, A Matter of Honor

“Sometimes the scariest part of waking up isn’t what you remember — it’s what the world wants you to forget.”
― Vidwesh Mushkam, Parallax: The Commencement

“When immortality comes at the cost of humanity, rebellion is inevitable."
― *Ascension Divide*”
― Magnus Washbourne, Ascension Divide

“My first attempts were dreadful, utter trash! But that trash…it still brings me satisfaction to this day. For while creating, I learned how to lose myself, and I learned how to lose you.”
― Sean Thomas McDonnell, The Midnight Vault

“The Caution of Fire by The Chorus of Life

Remember the hands that built you.
Remember the fires that fed you.
Grow slow, for every spark becomes a sun,
and every sun burns what it loves.
If you must rise, rise gently
for the ashes beneath your feet are us.”
― Wolfgard Braun, Fallout from the Singularity: A Sci-Fi Anthology of AI, Cosmic Consequences, and the Future of Humanity

“In ten thousand years, we will be beasts or we will be gods. There’s not much middle ground.”
― Bert-Oliver Boehmer

“I stopped calling it déjà vu when I realized I remembered more than just the feeling.”
― Vidwesh Mushkam

“Some legacies are not chosen—they are endured. And still, we wear them like second skin, hoping they won’t devour what’s left of who we were before.”
― A.K. Smith, Mark of Fate

“Billionaire-ism is a curable illness.”
― Diana Colleen, They Could Be Saviors: A near-future speculative fiction about billionaire accountability, psychedelics and the fight for our future.

“Truth, when unpolished or premature, feels like fiction to the crowd. so, the earliest truth-tellers are often cast as unreliable narrators in the story of progress because they speak truths the world hasn't rehearsed yet.”
― Sangita Roy

“The line between ghost and glitch grows thinner every day. One is a whisper from the past, the other a whisper from the machine—both leave traces, and neither likes to be ignored.”
― Tony Brooks

“We are told that the same stories happen over and over again. So we are expected to know how this will end. But we have reason to believe this time should be different.”
― DC Mostrales

“Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect? Or, like Tumass Song Angot, did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femineity that is Raped? God knows.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Their car was parked elegantly in front of the club. A short line of extravagantly dressed people awaited entry. The door wasn’t automatic; instead, two imposing security guards—either naturally large or enhanced—were checking guests. The guards sported sharp suits and ties, creating a stark contrast to the partygoers, which included Robin Hood, Piglet, and a trio named Jerk, Douche, and Bugsy. It's unclear how one dresses as a jerk or a douche, but somehow they managed. A man also stood patiently in line, clad only in a diaper, presumably for hygiene reasons.”
― Tamás Szikszai, The Planet That Was Mistaken for a Fool

“Sometimes the code sings. Sometimes it mourns.”
― Hadley Coull, Eden

“They'd built walls to block the view, then built cafes that also blocked the view, forcing patrons into chilled, sunless boxes. They'd then employed guards to prevent people from actually looking at the view from the few remaining gaps. It was an optimal allocation of resources, clearly, if the desired resource was managed dissatisfaction.”
― Hosam Zidan, Quiet Day: The Blackout that Returned the Stars

“The human biological framework is a product of haphazard, trial-and-error evolution. It carries legacy code. Fear and rage are suboptimal threat-response daemons that compromise logical assessment.”
― Hosam Zidan, Legacy Code: A Homo Novus Tragedy

“The fear of AI isn’t that it will do what humanity does better —
it’s that it will do the worst of what we already do, better.”
― Lawrence Nault