Science Fiction Quotes - Page 17

It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice...The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our sue, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern… “My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.

C.S. Lewis

Brother Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? ...I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!

Ronald D. Moore

Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, to inconsequntial, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we're up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there's a little splashing on the surface, but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.

Charles Yu

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

Brian W. Aldiss

A metric fuckton of dumb so epically mind-destroyingly beyond a bad idea that there's not a chance they would go there.

Andrea K. Höst

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.

Kevin J. Anderson

The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.

Octavia E. Butler

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Ray Bradbury

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

William L.K.

Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?''The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.

Ray Bradbury

As a general rule, you won't find the love of your life while you're on your knees under a table." -- Helios Dayspring

Belinda McBride

Never tell a computer to forget it.

Larry Niven

Ever since I could remember, She was all that mattered.

James J. Caterino

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

Stanisław Lem

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

A whore is a whore is a whore.Except when he's something else completely.From the writings of King Helios Dayspring, High Priest of the Temple of the Sun

Belinda McBride

... You have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.

Pierce Brown

No, they can't. They can't be Luke Skywalker.

Aaron Allston

Uh, excuse me, sir, I, uh, don't known how to uh, to uh, tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a little, uh, bit off."He grinned sheepishly."That's ridiculous!" murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask. "Check your watch." And then he went into his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee.

Harlan Ellison

Fish and visitors stink after three days.

Ursula K Le Guin

I saw the Earth, yes. I saw the colors so magnificent, so vivid, so real. It was hope so large and round, green and blue.

Hafsah Laziaf

When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person...What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking -- whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.And what good is all this to Black people?

Octavia E. Butler

Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.You'd scream if you had the breath.Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

Peter Watts

[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?"I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.

Tracy Hickman

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

Samuel R. Delany

...They are merely scars, not mortal wounds and you must use them to propel you forward.

Peter David

Don't pick up hitchhikers!"- D. Adams

Robert Lynn Asprin

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

Kevin J. Anderson

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Rutger Hauer

There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you.

Octavia E. Butler

I was there, the day that Horus killed the Emperor

Dan Abnett

Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.

Michael Crichton

I walked into adventure and adventure has given me blisters.

Andrea K. Höst

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted... hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first century Big Brother, take care of the rest.In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college - a sarcastic old bastard - who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

Stephen King

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.

Neil Gaiman

If you can’t change the world with chocolate chip cookies, how can you change the world?

Pat Murphy

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and itinspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

Philip K Dick

Good Samaritans: Truth, justice and the American way–for them it wasn't only a comic book code; it was a way of life. it was admirable, courageous, and inconvenient as shit. -Stefan, CHIMERA

Rob Thurman

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it?

Robert Buettner

No, when the time comes, I’m sure I’ll kill just like everybody else. I can’t go down without a fight. Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to…to show the Capitol they don’t own me.

Suzanne Collins

Leela: Why are we listening to them? It is a waste of time.The Doctor; It is difficult to know what will be a waste of time until after the time has been wasted, by which time it is too late. So predicting what will be a waste of time is something of a waste of time. Unless it gives you pleasure of course when it probably doesn't count as a waste of time.Leela (yawning): I am sorry I did not hear what you said, Doctor.The Doctor (smiling): That was a waste of time then.

Chris Boucher

You can give me detention. Oh, wait, that's right...you aren't the boss of me. So I guess you can just bite me. -Dean

Jeff Mariotte

I take it you know my companion?"Oh,yes!" said Savage, his smile disappearing. "We know all about Ruby Journey. Please don't let her kill anyone important. Or set fire to anything."Your reputation precedes you," Random said dryly to Ruby.

Simon R. Green

Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.

William Gibson

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

Aldous Huxley

I just saved your fucking life, Mom...It's like, if you--people of a certain age--would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.

Neal Stephenson

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

David Mitchell

We walk in dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for the One. We die for the One. -- the Ranger oath

J. Michael Straczynski

Conceited little mega-puppy.

Douglas Adams

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.

Arthur C. Clarke

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.

Douglas Adams

Bellamy had come down from scanning the heavens only to find himself in the depths of hell.

Kass Morgan

A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away.

Gene Roddenberry

We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams.

Orson Scott Card

All he cares about here on the edge of forever, is her. He does not want to die. Not because he is afraid. Simply because he cannot bear the thought of leaving her behind.

Amie Kaufman

BewareAt war Or at peace,More people die Of unenlightened self-interestThan of any other disease

Octavia E. Butler

If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.

John Twelve Hawks

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

Junot Díaz

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Science Fiction Quotes - Page 17

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