Nancy Kress Quotes

born 1948 United States

Nancy Kress (born January 20, 1948) is an American science fiction writer. She also used the pseudonym Anna Kendall for one young adult fantasy trilogy.

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Random Nancy Kress quote

22 quotes

She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself.

Probability Moon (2000)

An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives.

Probability Sun (2001)

Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job.

Probability Space (2002)

In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one.

Probability Sun (2001)

A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking.

Probability Moon (2000)

When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing.

Probability Sun (2001)

I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America.

With the Original Cast (1982)

Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?

Probability Sun (2001)

It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.

Probability Space (2002)

That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing.

Probability Sun (2001)

Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil.

Probability Space (2002)

Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home.

Probability Moon (2000)

Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech.

Probability Moon (2000)

But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science.

Probability Moon (2000)

By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair.
But he’d always known that was true of the universe.

Probability Space (2002)

How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?

Probability Moon (2000)

Anybody who says that we understand human motivation, that we can formulate simple and clear reasons for why people what they do, is either lying or naïve.

Cocoons (2015)

She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness.

Probability Space (2002)

The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater.

With the Original Cast (1982)

Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive.

Probability Space (2002)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Nancy Kress (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.