Charles Stross

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

Mike Resnick

Whatever your grievances, I'm sure we can address them without resorting to war," persisted Argyle....
Nonsense," said the alien. "Do you know how many laborers and industries we'd put out of work if we were to stop the war just because a few bleeding hearts think we can talk out our grievances?

The Boy looked at him for a long time before responding. “Well, as long as you’re my friend, I’ll never ignore you,” he said with conviction. “I know what it’s like to be invisible to other people.

And that is the story of the boy who cried "Dragon!"
Of course, when dragons sit around the campire at night or tuck their children into bed, they tell the story of the dragon who cried "Boy!

Once having seen it, you must draw or paint so that others can see it. Not the thing itself, but the way it seems, that is art. What else is there?

t's just the nature of things. Every lawyer starts out seeking justice and winds up seeking victories. Every doctor want to save his patients and ends up wanting to save his investments. And every journalist starts out caring about the truth and ends up caring about circulation.

Cory Doctorow

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?

If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.

He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.

All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.

I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

James K. Morrow

The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.

There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.

The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones.

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

Ockham's disposable razors.

Books don't repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.

Manichean dualism is the single worst idea people ever came up with — this notion that you can divide humankind into the children of light and the children of darkness.

Nancy Kress

Boredom [is] a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means, nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

Kage Baker

I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.

Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.

Don't imagine she trembles over the dissecting table either, Smith. She has nerves of ice. Real Good can be as ruthless as Evil when it wants to accomplish something, let me tell you.

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.

Cherie Priest

And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.

OMG YOU GUYS it has come to my attention that SOMEONE on the internet is saying that my fictional 19th century zombies are NOT SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND. Naturally, I am crushed. To think, IF ONLY I’d consulted with a zombologist or two before sitting down to write, I could’ve avoided ALL THIS EMBARRASSMENT.

It's funny what they say about men in uniform - how people think women just can't resist 'em. Fact is, I think we're just pleased to see a man groomed, bathed, and wearing clothes that fit him.

I gave three quiet cheers for Minnesota. In Seattle a dusty inch of anything white and chilly means the city lapses into full-on panic mode, as if each falling flake crashes to earth with its own individual baggie of used hypodermic needles. It’s ridiculous.

I was getting the hang of arson. It really sends a message, you know? Not only will I kill your dudes and steal your shit, but I will burn your place down behind me.

I hate meeting new people even new clients who intend to give me money. I try to be pleasant but I'm not very good at it. The best I can usually pull off is 'professional if somewhat chilly.' It's not ideal no. But it beats 'awkward and bitchy.

Kij Johnson

I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. 
For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. 
But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?

Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.

Adventures are what happens when an event is flawed, a mark of imperfection.

Love and memory and thought and dream ~
My favorite poems have never been written in words.

Waiting required a future to wait for: a falsehood. I know now that there is only now. I remember things that happened months (or what is years?) ago: old -worn-out nows. The future happens, but it is always shaped from a series of nows.

We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.

Peter Watts

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

Elizabeth Hand

But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.

You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

Endless longing; a face you'd known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you'd die for, and die of.

No lights shone beyond the windows of his room. The reflection from the bedside lamp seemed insubstantial as a candle flame; the darkness outside a solid mass, huge and inescapable, that pressed against the panes. His room sat beneath the eaves, where the wind didn't roar but crooned, a sound like mourning doves.

[Poetry] was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together.