Zevombat

“I was flying out to Connecticut for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane and by the time I got to New Haven I was so worried about Frodo and Sam that I said to my boyfriend, “It’s awful. They’re trying to sneak into Mordor and the Ringwraiths are after them and I don’t trust Gollum and …” and I completely forgot to break up with him. And, as of yesterday, we’ve been married thirty-nine years.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“Although helpful, a disembodied hand on the Bugatti’s steering wheel was a bit creepy, especially because this one was hairy and had No More Pies tattooed on the back.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eye of Zoltar

“History could be as arbitrary as poetry, he told himself: what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different "truths." Whereas myth digs deep into the fundamental reality of the spirit, into that infinite well that is the shared consciousness of the entire race, reaching the levels where truth is not an optional matter, but the inescapable foundation of all else. In that sense myth could be truer than history.”
― Robert Silverberg

“The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn