Matthew Williams > Matthew's Quotes

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#1

“When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.”
― William Gibson

tags: fiction, sci-fi

10 likes

#2

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

tags: bad, bad-guy, bad-person, crime, humor, motherfucker, revenge

637 likes

#3

“The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. ”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

366 likes

#4

“Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"

Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nighmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!

"Just kill the one with the sword first."

"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt--you target them because they're the officers, right?"

"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

tags: cryptonomicon

81 likes

#5

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

tags: future, planning

1081 likes

#6

“The street finds its own uses for things.”
― William Gibson

168 likes

#7

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”
― William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor

tags: memory, time

275 likes

#8

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

tags: cyberpunk, cyberspace, internet

368 likes

#9

“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'

- from "Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib'' by the Princess Irulan”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

tags: arrakis, attitude, complete, dune, knife

325 likes

#10

“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

tags: constitution, power, tyranny

88 likes

#11

“I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.”
― Berkeley Breathed

tags: characters, fiction, on-fiction

88 likes

#12

“I ought to have awesome core strength, you know, because this balancing thing is hard work.”
― Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

3 likes

#13

“There are no injuries that run so deep that one can't add insult to them and make them feel even worse.”
― Matthew S. Williams

tags: injuries, insult, pain, trauma

8 likes

#14

“If your dream is vivid, you work hard to live it!”
― C.C. Ekeke

tags: inspirational

3 likes

#15

“The traumatized soul finds no rest in conditions of peace. It’s forever questing for violence, for action, for the same combination of factors which gave rise to it in the first place.”
― Matthew S. Williams

tags: pain, peace, soul, traumatic-experiences

0 likes

#16

“The true test of a soldier’s mettle is whether or not they will cling to what they believe in, even in the face of impending death.”
― Matthew S. Williams

tags: death, mettle, soldier

0 likes

#17

“Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".”
― Charles Stross

tags: iama, interview, piracy

26 likes

#18

“Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.”
― Charles Stross, Accelerando

tags: intelligence, singularity

6 likes

#19

“Her heart, she had discovered in the last half year, was of durable stuff. You could test its mettle with a hammer.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

tags: hammer, heart, mettle

2 likes

#20

“When the universe presents unexpected gifts to those who feel undeserving, how else are they to react, except with sheer paranoia?”
― Matthew S. Williams

tags: gifts, luck, unexpected, universe

2 likes

#21

“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
― Pearl S. Buck

1458 likes

#22

“Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

41 likes

#23

“It was... the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

tags: christianity, religion

7 likes

#24

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

tags: bene-gesserit, fear, litany-against-fear, motivational, scifi

16752 likes

#25

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
― Niels Bohr

tags: science

4209 likes

#26

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom

43888 likes

#27

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism

46495 likes

#28

“The very definition of common sense: that which reinforces our current prejudices.”
― Matthew S. Williams

0 likes

#29

“A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act of faith-but only after the act has been committed, and the man committed to the act.”
― Arthur Koestler

tags: communism, faith, ideology, politics-quotes, stalinism

2 likes

#30

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

tags: distance, life, loneliness, qotd, sense-of-wonder, universe

6856 likes

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