Speculative Fiction Quotes

“At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness!”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

“Let the spirits guide you, but never let them take you.”
― E.J. Stevens, Spirit Storm

“And the minibar in my hotel room was mysteriously emptied."
"By arcane forces beyond the understanding of normal human beings?" asked Myfanwy as she sifted through the in-box. It was the sort of question you learned to ask automatically when you worked with the Checquy.
"No, it was me," admitted Shantay without a shred of embarrassment.”
― Daniel O'Malley, The Rook

“The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you’d never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings.”
― Alexandar Tomov, Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth

“Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly!”
― Bob Bello, Sci-fi Almanac, 2010: An Anthology of Short Stories

“Millions cheer the warrior
spilling blood across the ring
while the one who stands for peace
is ridiculed and shamed.
Must hearts forever suffer
from ignorance and greed?
Can bombs heal our souls
or set our spirits free?”
― Aberjhani, Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player

“Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“Funny, they made this new genre called Speculative Fiction, I thought all fiction had always been speculative.”
― Teri Louise Kelly

“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.

Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.
And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.

The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It is as it is. Betren son of Bromwell Defender of Delmarath”
― Cynthia Willerth, A Matter of Honor

“Perriad sipped at her ale, then sighed. "Ah, well, we may as well at least take a proper look at you. Though if you truly are as uneducated as you say I really cannot imagine what use we shall find for you.”
― Jon Sparks

“She decimated humanity for her own chance at living it.”
― Jennifer Lauer, THE GIRL IN THE ZOO

“Mimameid wasn’t built to keep people out. It was built to keep people in. It was built to be a fortress, to keep our people safe behind our walls, but The Celts have changed that.”
― Katherine Kempf, The Mimameid Solution

“If you ever need help - if there is ever a time when you need me, come here. Meet me at the clootie well. Nothing can touch us here, meurgerys.”
― Katherine Kempf, The Mimameid Solution

“What she felt was the pull of home.
And it felt so raw, like the landscape of the North Country being pulled free from the receding ice. The frozen layers that protected her heart were melting away. The wild North was calling to her.”
― Katherine Kempf, The Mimameid Solution

“Siobhan called upon an even deeper part of her. She’d seen what Petra hadn’t even known until that moment. That her love was a far more powerful force than her hate. And far more destructive.”
― Katherine Kempf, The Mimameid Solution

“Shub Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. Her love is felt across the cosmos and we happily fall under Her warm, eldritch embrace. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”
― Emily Wyeth, Mother's Milk

“My dollhouse has dimmer switches.”
― Bibiana Krall, Quantum-C

“And so, some think it may be possible to survive their presence if only one can enter into a state in which one is not afraid. Only we are so very afraid of them. How could we not be? They are monsters.”
― Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog: Stories

“He had given them everything that a human being had with the one exception of that most important thing of all -- the ability to exist within the human world.”
― Clifford D. Simak, Way Station

“They come from miles around, my characters do, traveling the great distance from the fringes of my mind’s eye, some even making the long and arduous haul from my childhood, just to sit and talk. They do this whenever I’m alone.”
― Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys, A Story Box Full Of Regret

“The books I list as ''read'' are the basic foundation, the core, of my reading for my own writing.”
― G.J. Quartermaine, Gateway To Gandamak

“Liberalism's fatal hypocrisy,' said Iris, 'was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers and brewers, so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders, we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all values that liberals like you, Eva, claim to cherish.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“All capitalism proved itself capable of after 2020 — just as after 2008 — was a fascinating reversal of natural selection: the larger an institution's failure and the steeper it's financial losses, the greater it's capacity to appropriate society's surplus bailouts.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more it's captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“BEWARE THE POWER TO CREATE MONEY FOR IT DOES TO ETHICS THAT WHICH WATER DOES TO SALT”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Scores of Mexicans gathered in the shadow of the US—Mexican border wall, weighing up the risk of scaling the barbed wire, while trucks laden with car parts, computers and beer passed freely into US soil. Africans drowned in their thousands in the Mediterranean as they attempted to follow the vegetables their continent exported to Europe. In the name of refashioning the world as a borderless global village, globalization was building new fences and reinforcing older ones everywhere.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Craig Henderson. You are the most attractive real estate agent in the region.”
― Laura Jean McKay, Gunflower