Richard Russo

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.

Andrea Barrett

We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.

I have no appetite,' she sighed. 'Not for food, not for work. Not for anything.' I looked at her and wondered what I am except appetite.

The life she'd led, each of the places she'd called home sending unexpected shoots toward the next, had made her open to almost anything.

In that light, across the field, is all I will never have. Next to me is all I will.

It was through Peter that she first understood that the world existed before her, without her. For a few days she could not forgive him for this.

We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write.

Geoff Ryman

Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

Sex complicates, but it is the power of love to simplify.

I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.

It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.

In the silence, nothing was fragmented. There were no separate strands to gather together, to fumble, to complete for attention. In the silence, all of that fell away, and there was only what was here, and what was to be done.

You know, all the evil in the world, all the sadness comes from not having a good answer to that question: What do I do next? You just keep thinking of good things to do, lad. You'll be all right. We'll all be all right. I wanted you to know that.

Vernor Vinge

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

So much technology, so little talent.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

Nnedi Okorafor

Flawed, imperfect creatures! That's what we both are, oga! That's what we ALL are!

Though I knew I shouldn’t have cared, the words still hurt like pinches, and pinches can be very painful when done in the same place many times in a row.

It's ok to care about what other people think, but you should give a little more weight to what you, yourself, think...The habit of thinking is the habit of gaining strength. You're stronger than you believe.

We embrace those things that make us unique or odd. For only in these things can we locate and then develop our most individual abilities.

Prejudice begets prejudice, you see. Knowledge does not always evolve into wisdom.

Silence is the best answer to a fool.

There are more valuable things in life than safety and comfort. Learn. You owe it to yourself.

To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them.

We prefer to explore the universe by traveling inward, as opposed to outward.

Kim Stanley Robinson

It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.

That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.

We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

Mur Lafferty

Strength is taking charge of your own destiny and not waiting on others to do so. You don’t have to swear and drink and beat people up and slay monsters. You’re allowed to cry and take care of children and cook and get your heart broken and dress up and date and get pregnant. But when decisions have to be made, a strong character makes them and doesn’t wait for someone else.

Politics is almost never violent toward the people who are actually making the political decisions.

Self-preservation is one of the signs of sentient life

One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.

Get a degree in mechanical engineering, Hiro. Get a pilot’s license, Hiro. Learn meditation and hypnosis, Hiro. Slip your roommate out of prison, Hiro. Drive thousands of clones and humans around in space, Hiro. Sit on your butt for four hundred years, Hiro.’ 
That’s what they told me. Not once did they say, Get shot and chased and stabbed by crazed crewmates, Hiro!”
“To be fair, you were one of the people doing the chasing, crazed at the time too,” Maria said.
“Semantics,” he said.

Sarah Gailey

She was faster than a secret spreading through a church picnic.

In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten. Much to everyone’s disappointment, Congress didn’t follow through on the plan, and today America lives a cursed life—a beef life, with nary a free-range hippo within the borders of our country.

Get used to it, ma’am. We have a saying where I’m from—boys will make you cry, but girls? Girls will make you sweat.

I regret nothing: it was worth it for the hats alone.

It’s not a caper,” Houndstooth replied, sounding irritated. “It’s an operation. All aboveboard.

Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg.

N. K. Jemisin

In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.

We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.

I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back."

But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always a little love left, underneath.
Yes. Horrible, isn't it?

Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.

They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.

Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.

Seanan McGuire

You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.

We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.

I’m a cat. We aren’t required to make sense.

She was a story, not an epilogue.

When Rome burned, the emperor's cats still expected to be fed on time.

Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn't broken.

If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.