Jack > Jack's Quotes

“Not the technical today that cold calendars count, but the shared today that text creates, the now when Martin wrote his words and the now in which we read them married across time’s diaspora.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Just because some of what led Earth to this crisis is our fault, yours mine, doesn't mean we can't still do real good. We're still here. Alive. We have the ability to act, and choose, and achieve. That's real. Even if it seems dwarfed by past mistakes, those mistakes aren't a negative number, they don't cancel out the good things we do now, don't make an insurmountable pit we have to climb back out of to start at zero. We can do good, and our pasts don't take that possibility away, not while we still live and breathe. And try.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“It feels like trying to juggle eight-side Rubik’s cubes while trying to solve them at the same time. And every time I drop one, God kills a billion kittens.”
― Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince

“You think you’ve uncovered a great mystery. You have no idea. You haven’t even scratched the surface of the history of the Empire.”
― Andreas Eschbach, The Carpet Makers

“I was born into this world without knowing what life was all about. Only power promised fulfillment in life, and I have pursued it--long enough to recognize that it's a false promise and that this road leads to nothing. But I tried. Even if we get no answers to our questions, it is the inalienable right of every living being to search for them--by all means, on all paths, and with all strength. What I did was only what I had a right to do.”
― Andreas Eschbach, The Carpet Makers

“Our modern moths have bounced so many times off lightbulbs, they aren’t prepared for torches, and forget that wings can burn.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists, and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“He wasn't such a bad fellow after all. The rudiments of self-improvement and the intention to achieve it were definitely present.”
― Walter Moers, The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

“Do you like to watch blood? Do you like to watch your own blood? Do you like to watch any blood spurting, gurgling, gushing, falling into very clear clean glass containers, missing and falling on to the floor sometimes, going all over until everything is that funny foamy red color, with all your towels, rugs, cloths and sponges soaked and the smell . . . ? Do you? Do you like to watch flesh being snipped, sliced, carved, shredded and made over. Do you? Do you like to watch your own flesh . . . . . . . . . ?”
― David R. Bunch, Moderan

“I'm not in this business primarily to describe or explain or entertain. I'm here to make the reader think, even if I have to bash his teeth out, break his legs, grind him up, beat him down, and totally chastise him for the terrible and tinsel and almost wholly bad world we allow.”
― David R. Bunch

“Inoshiro laughed. "So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be foolish?”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora