Alternate Universe Quotes

“You've probably all had those kinds of dreams that are like usual life, except that a lot of things are not the same, and you seem to know the future in them. Well, this is because these other worlds where two things can happen spread out from our world like rainbows, and sort of flow into one another-”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Witch Week

“Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.”
― Michael A. Arnzen

“Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“He’d spent the night in the boat. Next to the spaghetti queen.

William glanced at the hobo girl. She sat across from him, huddled in a clump. Her stench had gotten worse overnight, probably from the dampness. Another night like the last one, and he might snap and dunk her into that river just to clear the air.

She saw him looking. Dark eyes regarded him with slight scorn.

William leaned forward and pointed at the river. “I don’t know why you rolled in spaghetti sauce,” he said in a confidential voice. “I don’t really care. But that water over there won’t hurt you. Try washing it off.”

She stuck her tongue out.

“Maybe after you’re clean,” he said.

Her eyes widened. She stared at him for a long moment. A little crazy spark lit up in her dark irises. She raised her finger, licked it, and rubbed some dirt off her forehead.

Now what?

The girl showed him her stained finger and reached toward him slowly, aiming for his face.

“No,” William said. “Bad hobo.”

The finger kept coming closer.”
― Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon

“Even though this world is narrow, it is wide... to those who understand.

This world isn't the only one.”
― CLAMP

“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.

And this one is Teddy's.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“The mysteries of universe are revealed to those who seek to know the truth of their own existence first.”
― Anjali Chugh, Inner Awakening....Ascending to Higher Dimensions Vol. 2: Past Lives, Reincarnations and Alternate Realities

“It was an alien place, as much inhuman as it was ungodly. There was no life in this place. It was a different world altogether.
This world was dead.”
― Angelo Tsanatelis, Origins

“A wise man does not always admit to everything he knows. And sometimes an overly-credulous friend can be a source of mild amusement.”
~Sherlock Holmes”
― Stephanie Osborn, The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival

“Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew—Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie—all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“Perhaps there was another life, not so sad, that I missed somehow this time, and will have in another world.”
― Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

“Enemy," hiss the bushes all around. The rest of the Pride glided forward, surrounding Lily, Rowan, and Spike.”
― Josephine Angelini, Witch's Pyre

“The thing that's hard about it—the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance—is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now—the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Suddenly the images in the center of the room became more than images. They solidified.”
― Stephanie Osborn, The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival

“And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent to this one, claimed his life. As if he was his own ghost, standing slightly behind himself, observing.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn't been Tony.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“That’s our cue,” Dr. Chadwick noted, managing to approximate a cheerful smile, addressing the room at large. “Everyone please stand behind the yellow line until the doors open. No food, drink, flash photography, or video cameras are permitted. Once aboard the ride, please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times until we come to a full and complete stop. Otherwise, they’re apt to end up in another universe somewhere without ya, and wouldn’t that fry your noggin?”
― Stephanie Osborn, The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival

“I am looking forward to fully understanding what is occurring. Other than the fact that we are well over a century in my future—if it is MY future; in America, in an underground government facility of some sort near the Colorado Rocky Mountains, specifically Pikes Peak, so I assume the nearest city of any import to be Colorado Springs…I am afraid I have little grasp of your project.”
~Sherlock Holmes”
― Stephanie Osborn, The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival

“Watson fully comprehended the fact that occasionally it is useful for one’s adversaries to underestimate one’s abilities.”
~Sherlock Holmes”
― Stephanie Osborn, The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival

“Rebecca approached the causality violation chamber (too grand a name for such a faulty thing), placed her hand against its door, and closed her eyes, much as Philip had during its christening years ago. There was no response from the machine; no prophecy; no apology; no advice. It did not relay the news from other, brighter timelines. It did not tell her what would have transpired had she returned from yesterday's shopping trip a few hours later, or had she turned the steering wheel left instead of right two years ago, or had she not taken that first drink, or had she turned down any one of the thousands of drinks that had followed, or had she chosen not to respond to Philip's insistent and perhaps deliberately oblivious messages during the early days of their online courtship, or had her parents or her grandparents, or her great-grandparents never met. The machine's obstinate silence was all it had to offer; the message of that silence was that she had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been having these weird dreams like every single night for three weeks now where I'm being contacted. Not by ghosts, exactly, but people from other histories, where things turned out differently than they did here. And they're all envious. And they all say: You are so lucky. You live in the best of all possible worlds. And you don't even know it.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“If the future changed, and the time traveler we're talking about was from that future, and was the product of events that created that future, why wouldn't the time traveler also change when those events changed?”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree—that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesn't just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root that's back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.'

Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—'

'Purely hypothetical—'

'—time travelers.'

'So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that's his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Her consciousness emerges within when the beast of the darkness allows them. This beast was a conjuration of the billion innocent souls lost to the structure of modernization. He was an archetype that transcended time and reality, a governing force as natural as nature itself, and yet this darkness was a new kind, born out of technology only apparent in the last few hundred years.”
― MacKenzie R. Mazerolle, Wild Man

“Not so much a game
as a sphere,
a mystery.
Held up to light,
a small hole
into another dimension.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“Apparitions are, so to speak, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the first beginnings of them. There is, of course, no reason why a healthy man should see them, because a healthy man is mainly a being of this earth, and therefore for completeness and order he must live only this earthly life. But as soon as he falls ill, as soon as the normal earthly state of the organism is disturbed, the possibility of another world begins to appear, and as the illness increases, so do the contacts with the other world, so that at the moment of a man's death he enters fully into that world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Aidan and Kai were almost the same height, but frequently Kai seemed smaller, even less mature. Aidan couldn't completely explain it. Certainly, Kai had suffered far less in his life. Aidan wondered how Kai would have coped with the horrors he himself had endured, and allowed himself a cold smile at the thought of the bookish Kai chained in a screwship's dark hold, squirming in his own shit.”
― Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood