Tim Powers > Quotes

“Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“The Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys while the cat by the fire is curled. Then away they floats in their eggshell boats, down the drains to their underground world.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“Time,” he said solemnly, “is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curled around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“Let us quickly be finished with this business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.”
― Tim Powers, Declare

“Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.

Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle.

Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill…But be willing to die for your choice.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense* -- not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober).”
― Tim Powers, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories

“Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives it away.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“…And unmoored souls may drift on stranger tides
Than those men know of, and be overthrown
By winds that would not even stir a hair…”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again.
'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies,
'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.'
Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“Por la escalera, hacia la luz del sol, fueron saliendo el cocinero (que, obviamente, había seguido la vieja costumbre de enfrentarse a un desastre en la mar emborrachándose tan rápida y concienzudamente como le fue posible) […]”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“Under,” he said in a shaky voice, “normal circumstances, I’d certainly be in love with you.” “Nobody falls in love under normal circumstances,” she said softly, rubbing his finger with her warm thumb. He restrained an impulse to look to see if there was still ink on it. “Love isn’t in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway.”
― Tim Powers, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories

“As soon as I get a ship that can take to the open seas, I'm going to find and rescue and - if there's any worth in me - marry the only woman in whom I can see both a body and a face, and with whom I need not resign one or the other of my own.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” —William Faulkner”
― Tim Powers, Medusa's Web

“Summer lightning made it seem that flickering white-hot wires were turning in the terribly blue sky just above the horizon, and the recent storms had driven in toward shore hundreds of gigantic Portuguese man-o'-wars that now hung below the surface of the water like big malignant pearls.”
― Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard

“And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece – just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.”
― Tim Powers, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories

“The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.”
― Tim Powers, Expiration Date

“A kid just couldn’t see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.”
― Tim Powers, Expiration Date

“Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he'd dropped something. "It's -- do keep calm now -- it's right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly."

Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.

And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn't just die in this instant.”
― Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard

“Newton must have been right when he’d said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him.”
― Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard

“His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“It was beer, not fire, that Prometeus stole from the gods and brought to man.”
― Tim Powers, The Drawing of the Dark

“Bugge had leaned forward then. “Who’s the man?” he asked. “The one who hasn’t come, though the hour has?” “It is the man who will lead you. Listen to me now, you complacent fathers and householders, and don’t make up your twopenny minds that what I’m saying is necessarily a fable. Do you recall the stories of Sigmund, who drew out Odin’s sword easily from the Branstock Oak when no other man in the Volsung’s hall could budge it with his best efforts?” “Certainly,” Bugge had nodded. “And I also recall what became of that sword when the one-eyed god inexplicably turned on him. Odin shattered it in battle, and Sigmund, left unarmed, was killed by Lyngi’s spearmen.” The magician had nodded. “That’s true. Now listen, Odin has allowed—ordered, rather—Sigmund himself to return to the flesh, to lead you in pushing back Muspelheim’s hordes.” The men around the table had been skeptical, but afraid to let Gardvord see it. “How will we meet him?” piped up one of them. “You must sail up the Elbe, through various tributaries and overland crossings, and finally down the Danube. When you have reached the city that is built around Balder’s barrow, you’ll know it, because,” he paused impressively, “Sigmund will actually rise from the water to greet you. I suspect the barrow is near the city of Tulln, but I can’t be sure. You’ll know the spot, in any case, by Sigmund’s watery resurrection”
― Tim Powers, The Drawing of the Dark

“What’s a pandemonium?” whispered one of the men in the rear.
“It’s like a calliope,” answered a companion. “I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister’s boy play his organ.”
“His what?”
“His organ.”
“Lord. People pay money to see things like that?”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“Stop to mourn for every good man that’s died for us and you’d never get from bed to the chamber-pot.”
― Tim Powers, The Drawing of the Dark

“It’s a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we’re the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it’s a district of England or France or Spain.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“When the Arabs untied him and carried him aboard the dahabeeyeh, a low, single-masted boat with a little cabin in the back, he was half delirious and muttering, 'Beer... beer...' Fortunately they seemed to recognise the word, and brought him a jug of what was, blessedly and unmistakably, beer.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“But to be God—which of course meant to have been God all along—he had to justify every event in his past, define every action in terms that made it consistent with godhood…there could no longer be any incidents that were too uncomfortable to remember.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides