Science Fiction Quotes

Verily, a man without fear is either dead or happy to die.

Asleep you can experience many hours whilst only a few waking moments have passed. This is why dreams are an ideal platform for training.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals by fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged but in the creature judging, and when we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

Orson Scott Card

I guess I should thank you for totally making my morning. It’s not every day a stranger notices my perspiration level.- Dr. Jeri Asher (BLACK MARIAH - A Calling)

Richard Finney

She loves dogs. And in time, who knows, maybe she would even have ended up loving the type of dogs who eat other small dogs for lunch.-- Leslie McNeill

Richard Finney

If there’s a zeppelin, it’s alternate history. If there’s a rocketship, it’s science fiction. If there are swords and/or horses, it’s fantasy. A book with swords and horses in it can be turned into science fiction by adding a rocketship to the mix. If a book has a rocketship in it, the only thing that can turn it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.

Debra Doyle

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

Dan Brown

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

Francis William Aston

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say,There! That's the truth!

Urusla K Le Guin

We need to keep government small, but we also need to keep the influence of big business small, and we need to keep the power in the hands of the people, where it belongs. Big government and big business aren’t the only two alternatives.

Michael Monroe

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.

Arthur C. Clarke

Blacker than the night, the wedge penetrated the darkness. An F 117 raced by, the roar from its engines screaming through the interior of the chopper, and then it sliced away a piece of sky and disappeared into the void.-Narrator, Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project

Daniel P. Douglas

The moon shines like a freshly unwrapped cheese ball at the holidays.”-William Harrison in Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project

Daniel P. Douglas

There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. ... 1Q84 - that's what I'll call this new world. Q is for 'question mark'. A world that bears a question.

Haruki Murakami

I’m sorry, Bill, I thought you said something about aliens? Did you give up the menthols for marijuana? Or maybe they now have flavored joints as well?

Daniel P. Douglas

Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain"."I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case.

Isaac Asimov

Wait awhile, and everything will change."~'Griblich

Stephanie Osborn

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

Iain M. Banks

The ultimate irony in this vast struggle (available to audience members who want to think about it but easily ignored by those who accept the semi-happy ending ) is the irony in many time loop (or ontological paradox) stories: John Connor has created himself (though he has not gone as far as the character in Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” who is both his own father and mother). Far worse, by saving his mother’s life and ensuring the destruction of the Terminator, John Connor has created Skynet just as surely as Skynet has created John Connor by trying to kill him. Both Connor and Skynet exist in a time loop without outside causality. The Terminator’s surviving arm makes Skynet possible, but it is never invented, only found and back-engineered. Kyle Reese comes across time for Sarah Connor because of a picture and because John Connor asks him to, but neither the picture nor John Connor would exist if Reese had not already gone back in time. The simplest way to save the world is to let the Terminator kill Sarah Connor. Then (in all probability), no one would find a piece of the advanced technology, and Skynet could not be built. But, Cameron’s plot suggests, the “perils to come that would result from our hubris and blind faith in technology” may be inescapable, a time loop, a feedback loop, leading directly if not necessarily inevitably to destruction."Fighting the History Wars on the Big Screen: From the Terminator to Avatar" from The Films of James Cameron

Ace G. Pilkington

Space, as you can see, is a complete void, nothing but clear air, without solid objects or the illumination of light. On some of our photographs of space, however, studied close to, even without a magnifying glass or an enlargement lens, you will notice, in the remote background, stars, some solitary, others in shimmering clusters. And in the next set of photographs you will see the alien machine we encountered that sat stubbornly stationary in the way of our unselfgoverned path.

Philip Dodd

Powell’s face appeared on screen. “It’s true, the doomsday crowd is a little crazy,” she said, looking thoughtful. “But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Forrest Carr

You have to think if we've been visited by extraterrestrial life, it was like a zookeeper walking into the chimp enclosure: He looks around, takes some pictures, then leaves without interacting significantly with the environment. Meanwhile the chimps have no idea what the fuck just happened.

J. Richard Singleton

Jasper set an intercepting course towards that Rhylonian Star Duster. Maybe we can catch them on their blind side.”“Doesn’t this ship have a cloak?” Jaq asks.“Miss Synergy, I don’t know what they teach now a’days at the Academy, but ships do not wear clothes.

Nathan Reese Maher

Myths grew from the ancient tradition of passing on knowledge orally, the only means of doing so before writing.They’re narratives of human existence. They helped our ancestors interpret reality, solve problems, and guided social behavior. They structured natural and social information into patterns using symbols, and embedded fact into story form. This increased their impact, making information meaningful and personally involving—not just cold, detached facts.

Alan Joshua

Evening had turned the sky a deep persimmon. The remaining sunlight enriched the colors of the ubiquitous flowers and foliage to even greater vibrancy, as if the saturation filter had been notched up several levels.Caleb noted all this in passing as he strode deliberately forward. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, only that he had to make the attempt.

G.S. Jennsen

Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.

Arthur C. Clarke

There were things she wanted to say, but they were all jumbled up in her head and if she tried they’d come out backwards and mixed up and wrong. There were things she needed to say, but she was hanging on by a fraying thread and feared if she tried the thread would break, sending her plummeting alone into the abysm.There were things she would have to say, but they should wait for later. After.

G.S. Jennsen

Everything I do nowWas once an unremembered dream.-Spoken by Dr. Perry after return from the chrysalis

Don Murphy

2 SECONDSHe was on her in an instant to brace her against the wall. She kicked and clawed at her unseen attacker, skin and irises ablaze in caustic gold. She fired anew, and the point-blank shot broke through his defenses, grazing his hip. He ignored the harsh sting to bring his Daemon up between them.1 SECOND

G.S. Jennsen

Thing to know about the Reaches....It’s always trying to kill you. Even the empty places between the stars."Asher Corsair, Allies and Enemies: Rogues

Amy J. Murphy

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.

Harry Harrison

I am in short, a witch of the quantumverse.

Philip Palmer

The machines of this place are failing, and the woman and I are here all alone. The perpetual motion engine, as brilliant and beautiful as it is, is running down—nothing lasts forever. But before this little world falls out of the sky there still might be time enough for redemption. There is still time for me to say the words that I should have had the courage to say at the beginning.There is still time, perhaps, for one more miracle.Hello, Miranda.

Dexter Palmer

She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgement and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky.

Dexter Palmer

Is happiness found in the nest where there's no hardship? Or is it in the outer world with vast sky? When the time comes, what would you keep and what would you abandon?

Norn9 norn+nonet

But it must be inconvenient to not be able to remember your name. I'll give you my last name, if you want.

Kakeru Yuiga

Humanity’s first faster-than-light spacecraft crashed into Pluto and vaporised a significant portion of it. Oops. Pluto’s status as a planet had been a matter of contention since the early twenty-first century and had come close to starting the fourth world war at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Making it even smaller did absolutely nothing to help the situation, and humanity came five minutes, and one hasty phone call, from another world war.

L. G. Estrella

We need to give an informative set of criteria for the best explanation. It is very difficult to do so. Here are some factors which should be taken into account

Michael E Emmering

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?

Ray Bradbury

Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

E.M. Forster

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.

Brian W. Aldiss

The name Atlantis came from an old book Victoria had never read. A lifetime residency in the ASM paradise was rumored to cost anywhere from 15 to 20 million dollars. The rich and powerful lived under the dome because they considered themselves separate and superior. Few of them left the comfort and security of Atlantis. To them the outside world was weak. Second Sector citizens where miscreant dregs of a defunct society. In order to enter the Atlantian dome one first had to be cleared by a resident. Gate security personnel strictly enforced this rule, even when outsiders carried a badge and gun.

Benjamin R. Smith

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories - most included in this volume - which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out of control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalistic" or the "incredible" was all pretty much the same to him. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, NIGHTMARE are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the "fantastic" was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent, the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. "Jane Brown's Body" is a suspense story. THE BRIDE WORE BLACK is science fiction. PHANTOM LADY is a gothic. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.

Barry N. Malzberg

She didn’t want to be the savior of humanity. She never had. She didn’t want to be the vanguard—of destruction or salvation. What she had really wanted was to be a girl whose father lived to show her the stars.Instead she had been left to wander them alone. Until she discovered someone who saw the stars as she did.

G.S. Jennsen

Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place.

Jeno Marz

I'm going home." - Celeste"To never return?" - Uway"Yes, show me the way to never return." - CelesteALL LIGHT WILL FALL

Almney King

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing. Caleb?Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters.She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal.

G.S. Jennsen

People gravitated here for the open air, the prolific intoxicants and the visual treats. They made the deals here that were later played out elsewhere. They drank and got high. Sometimes they fought, not for money but for sport or grudge.They were the desperate and the daring, the lost and the searching. Tonight, they were his audience. Tomorrow, they would be his front line.

G.S. Jennsen

A place without meaning is no place to be.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

Nathan Reese Maher

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

Nathan Reese Maher

Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?

Nathan Reese Maher

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

Nathan Reese Maher

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

Nathan Reese Maher

She leaves my side and heads deeper intothe apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

Nathan Reese Maher

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

Nathan Reese Maher

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what youshould name it.

Nathan Reese Maher

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Science Fiction Quotes

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