112 quotes
This was unrecorded history, unhappening even as it happened.
The Cartesian Theater (2006)
The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)
After a gaudy sunset that land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.
Darwinia (1998)
Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase.
Bios (1999)
I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)
Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.
Spin (2005)
Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.
Blind Lake (2003)
For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.
Memory Wire (1987)
Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.
Bios (1999)
It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.
Spin (2005)
“Ah, books.” Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. “They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.”
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)
For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.
And death?
I don’t fear death.
I dread the absence of it.
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)
Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.
The Chronoliths (2001)
When does loyalty become martyrdom?
The Chronoliths (2001)
Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another.
The Chronoliths (2001)
I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.
Axis (2007)
We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.
Axis (2007)
“Baumgartner’s coke habit isn’t the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage.”
“Coke?”
“Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose.”
Last Year (2016)
It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.
The Chronoliths (2001)