Connie Willis

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.

And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.

I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. 

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

Andrew Marvell

How should I avoid to be her slave,
Whose subtle art invisibly can wreath
My fetters of the very air I breath?

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Robert Ludlum

I mean, we're all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren't we?

Well, let me tell you, gentlemen, the games of the devil are not restricted to those confined to hell. Others can play them.

Sleep is a weapon!

A man's weaknesses may intrude on his faith but they do not diminish it."

Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically.

The most precious jewels are not made of stone, but of flesh

There'll come a moment when you think you can make it, and you'll try.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you are right. As one grows older, this is easier still

The end did not justify the means, but justifiable means that brought about a fair and necessary conclusion were not to be dismissed.

Louis Ferdinand Céline

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.

The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.

There's no tyrant like a brain.

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.

Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.

That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.

A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that’s him, our master. Come, kiss me.

Haruki Murikami

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.

I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

David Mitchell

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.

Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

Erich Segal

Love means never having to say you're sorry.

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.

What the hell makes you so smart?" I asked. "I wouldn't go for coffee with you, " she answered. "Listen -- I wouldn't ask you." "That, "she replied "is what makes you stupid.

Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness.

The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.

There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.

The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights.If you hear bells, get your ears checked.

Jack Prelutsky

As soon as Fred gets out of bed,
his underwear goes on his head.
His mother laughs, "Don't put it there,
a head's no place for underwear!"
But near his ears, above his brains,
is where Fred's underwear remains.

At night when Fred goes back to bed,
he deftly plucks it off his head.
His mother switches off the light
and softly croons, "Good night! Good night!"
And then, for reasons no one knows,
Fred's underwear goes on his toes.

Be glad your nose is on your face,
not pasted on some other place,
for if it were where it is not,
you might dislike your nose a lot.

Imagine if your precious nose
were sandwiched in between your toes,
that clearly would not be a treat,
for you'd be forced to smell your feet.

Iain Banks

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.

After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.

The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.

I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Amy Lowell

What is poetry? Is it a mosaic
Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought
Into a pattern? Rather glass that's taught
By patient labor any hue to take
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught
With storied meaning for religion's sake.

My cup is empty to-night,
Cold and dry are its sides,
Chilled by the wind from the open window.
Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight.
The room is filled with the strange scent
Of wistaria blossoms.
They sway in the moon's radiance
And tap against the wall.
But the cup of my heart is still,
And cold, and empty.
When you come, it brims
Red and trembling with blood,
Heart's blood for your drinking;
To fill your mouth with love
And the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.