You haven’t seen untidiness until you’ve seen a room where the gravity has failed twice in different directions.
-- from "Only Forward" by Michael Marshall Smith
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The one thing you can’t give for your heart’s desire is your heart.
-- from "Memory" by Lois McMaster Bujold
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Deep they delved us, high they builded us, fair they wrought us, but they are gone.
-- from "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Fear is the little death, fear is the mindkiller.
-- from "Dune" by Frank Herbert
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There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
-- from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein
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How wicked, oh my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
-- from "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
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We are not defined by what we die for, but by what we live for.
-- from "Shaman's Crossing" by Robin Hobb
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On a shelf over the experiment table was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put there to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist.
-- from "A Face in the Frost" by John Bellairs
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But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid--that has to mean something.
-- from "The Silent Gondoliers" by S. Morgenstern
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Violence is the last refuge of the incompent.
-- from "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov (by mouth of Salvor Hardin)
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I saw her chewing gum, when I was thirteen, and I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.
-- from "Troll Bridge" by Neil Gaiman
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I will hate the man you choose because he isn't me, and love him if he makes you smile.
-- from "The Eye of the World" by Robert Jordan
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No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
-- from "Jhereg" by Steven Brust
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The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
-- from "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
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For a change, Lady Luck seemed to be smiling on me. Then again, maybe the fickle wench was just lulling me into a false sense of security while she reached for a rock.
-- from "The Icarus Hunt" by Timothy Zahn
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It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.
-- from "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk
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It may even be too late, but shall we walk together a while, you and I?
-- from "Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay
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Every time we fix something that's broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that's an act of magic.
And what makes it magic is that we can choose to create or help, just like we can choose to harm.
-- from "The Mystery of Grace" by Charles de Lint
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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
-- from "The Claw of the Conciliator" by Gene Wolfe
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What is life, but an improvisation to the music?
-- from "The Dragon Waiting" by John M. Ford
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"Sorry," he said. "But it is funny, isn't it? All these years. All these years a secret. Greatest discovery in centuries. Too big a secret. Say nothing to anybody. Too dangerous. And now this! A beauty treatment...It is funny, isn't it? Don't you think it's funny?"
-- from "Trouble with Lichen" by John Wyndham
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I must not have fun. Fun is the time-killer. Fun is for children, customers and the help. I will forget fun. I will take a pass on it. And while it is going, I will turn a blind eye towards it. When fun is gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain - I, and my will to win. Damn, I'm good.
-- from "Doon" by the Harvard Lampoon
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Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
-- from "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman
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Once upon a time, when men and women hurled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
-- from "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A.S. Byatt
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Fair was she, and fatal as fair,
And cursed who gave her ear --
Now men are few, and wolves are more,
And winter drawing near.
-- from "Gate of Ivrel" by CJ Cherryh
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For each of us it is the same: worlds close or open as we go.
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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
-- from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft
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I am rather of the opinion that in England a gentleman’s dreams are his own private concern. I fancy there is a law to that effect and, if there is not, why, Parliament should certainly be made to pass one immediately!
-- from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" by Susanna Clarke
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Ignorance is natural. Stupidity takes commitment.
-- from "The Quote Book of Solomon Short" by David Gerrold
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Best not to speculate, really. You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say.
-- from "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
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They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived together on Novy Mir for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.
-- from "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson
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That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
-- from "The Stand" by Stephen King
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I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
-- from "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi
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The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes… No—this, more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale
-- from "The Book of Sand" by Jorge Luis Borges
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Your Father calls you to His Court. You need not pack; you go garbed in glory as you stand.
-- from "Paladin of Souls" by Lois McMaster Bujold
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The Adversary is not creative, except in the sense that he always seeks evil and always does good.
-- from "A Case of Conscience" by James Blish
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What else do you do when you get a strange dream, but check it in the catalogue?
-- from "Unquenchable Fire" by Rachel Pollack
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The primate was staring intently into her face as it made the same gesture, the same sign, over and over again: rubbing its palm in a circular motion over its chest, then a fist-on-palm gesture. Its eyes never left hers.
Please help me. Please help me. Please…
-- from "City of Pearl" by Karen Traviss
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If you find out anything about human sexual identity from infertility genetics, it’s that there is no straightforward match between variations in chromosomal sex and the behaviour of the individual.
-- from "Life" by Gwyneth Jones
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One thing dying people usually know, if they have any sense left, is what they want; and that is so rare in the human condition that it commands a certain kind of respect.
-- from "We Who Are About To…" by Joanna Russ
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I'm sorry, darling. I didn't want to shock you. I thought I could speake to you because you're the one person who's impervious to any sort of shock. I shouldn't have. It's no use. I guess.
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Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress.
-- from "Jingo" by Terry Pratchett (by wouth of Lord Vetinari)
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"It would be simplest," she said diffidently, "to answer your question by saying 'magic' just as you answered mine with 'quantum mechanics.'"
-- from "Glory Road" by Robert Heinlein
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I had an unfortunate experience when I was a young operative, you see; I was baptized in the blood of a martyr.
-- from "Mendoza in Hollywood" by Kage Baker
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The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering ot the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd.
-- from "Singularity Sky" by Charles Stross
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"Luckily," he went on, "you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as 'impossible' in my dictionary. In fact," he added, brandishing the abused book, "everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade' seems to be missing."
-- from "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams
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