Outis > Outis's Quotes

“I am sorry, I am very sorry to ask you to lie," he said, so earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That made him seem more like a god than a human being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness

“It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round.”
― Greg Egan, Oceanic

“Gabriel knew that he had let himself in for a certain amount of ridicule when he decided to allow himself to be worshiped. In the end he decided that the precedent of actually forbidding a religion was more distasteful than being plagued by the devout.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“a man of no religion, who dares use pain as a weapon, tainting it for mundane things”
― Aliette de Bodard, The Jaguar House, in Shadow

“The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’ ‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions

“He’d never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists?”
― Greg Egan, Axiomatic

“Four are the tributaries of the great river. Four are the harvests from floodseason to dust. Four are the great treasures: timbalin, myrrh, lapis, and jungissa. Four bands of color mark the face of the Dreaming Moon. Red for blood. White for seed. Yellow for ichor. Black for bile.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon

“Parantham finally realized that selecting a star on the map enabled a sub-menu with the unassuming option "Go to star". Choosing this did not change the map's viewpoint or magnification; rather, it caused the map to inquire politely, "Are you sure you wish to travel to this star?”
― Greg Egan, Incandescence

“she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“Nothing in the world has tentacles or fins or paws or claws. Nothing in the world soars. Nothing swims. Nothing purrs, barks, growls, roars, chitters, trills, or cries repeatedly two notes, a descending fourth, for three months of the year. There are no months of the year. There is no moon. There is no year.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“The voice of a rebeck echoed from somewhere behind him. The music echoed and echoed until it entered his head, still echoing. It suffused his body and he felt himself to be large, very large, not a child at all. And his skin was not his own.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Things could not be forever ordered and formulated. He had to find the rhythm of change and see between the changes to the changing itself.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Let's throw his ass out the airlock," suggested the Speaker of the House.
"We can't do that," said the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was a feeble old Mechanist who was subject to nosebleeds. "He is still Secretary of State and can't be sentenced without impeachment by the Senate."
The three Senators, two men and a woman, looked interested. The Senate didn't see much action in the government of the tiny Democracy. They were the least trusted members of the crew and were outnumbered by the House.”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus

“Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation.”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus

“it was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0-3 age group”
― Greg Egan, Oceanic

“I hate it!" he said. "I don't want to be human anymore."
"Neither do I," she said. "It's not a good place to be.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“Terror skittered around the fringes of his consciousness on fast rodent feet.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“Gabriel flashed him the one-fingered Mudra of Contempt.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“When the tragedies of others become for us diversions, sad stories with which to enthrall our friends, interesting bits of data to toss out at cocktail parties, a means of presenting a pose of political concern, or whatever…when this happens we commit the gravest of sins, condemn ourselves to ignominy, and consign the world to a dangerous course. We begin to justify our casual overview of pain and suffering by portraying ourselves as do-gooders incapacitated by the inexorable forces of poverty, famine, and war. “What can I do?” we say, “I’m only one person, and these things are beyond my control. I care about the world’s trouble, but there are no solutions.” Yet no matter how accurate this assessment, most of us are relying on it to be true, using it to mask our indulgence, our deep-seated lack of concern, our pathological self-involvement.”
― Lucius Shepard, The Best of Lucius Shepard

“She was the woman in the table.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface—the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin—there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“Art that's blind to the true landscape we inhabit - physical reality in the widest sense - is just absurdly, pathetically blinkered and myopic.
So while I'm sure that the individual works I've written have only succeeded to varying degrees, I'm still proud to have done something to nudge the center of gravity of contemporary SF some microscopic distance towards a genuine engagement with reality." -Greg Egan”
― Karen Burnham, Greg Egan