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.

Yoon Ha Lee

The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.

All communication is manipulation, Jedao said. You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.

In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity's far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song.

But then, war is about taking the future away from people.

The silence could have swallowed a star.

I’m not a linguist, but do you ever think there’s something wrong with the things we do and don’t have words for?

There are too many shapes of love to be counted. One of them is forgiveness.

She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.

What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?

The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don't fold.

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.

Paul lay in his room, letting the sick, glorious feeling of grease and carbohydrates carry him away. He wanted to think of nothing more than the feeling of his stomach, obscenely full for the first time ever.

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.

Ann Leckie

Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen.

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

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.

There's truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.

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

You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.

J. G. Farrell

Why do people insist on defending their ideas and opinions with such ferocity, as if defending honour itself? What could be easier to change than an idea?

We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us....but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?

The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them.

Surely there’s no need to abandon one’s reason simply because one is in Ireland.

I read somewhere that the boatman who rowed King William back across the river after the Battle of the Boyne is supposed to have asked the King which side won … To which the King replied: “What’s it to you? You’ll still be a boatman.

How few human beings, the major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny.

Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved.

It seems that’s there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that “the cheapest will survive”. This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated.

Paul Scott

English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population

The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.

One always saw and sees through pretense.

There’s a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.

Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.

Penelope Fitzgerald

To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment.

Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.

Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.

Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention.

She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.

There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.

She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.

Thomas Keneally

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

The List is Life.", Schindler's List.

Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.

He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.

Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. 

Anita Brookner

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.