The Year's Best Science Fiction Quotes

“Nice is such a toothless word. Do you want to have your gravestone say, ‘Here lies Amelia. She was nice’? Come, come.” “I suppose not.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“Westerners demand authenticity even though they don’t really want it. They cry out for meat without cruelty, war without casualties, thinness without hunger. But the Chinese don’t mind artifice.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“An eternal life shared with another grows less attractive if the other is off his nut.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“Every single choice you make is micro-analyzed when you’re a woman. When you’re a man, you can fuck up as many times as you want. Nobody asked Mauricio Garcés why he made shit films. But then you get old and nobody cares. Nobody knows you, anymore.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“life was more like a game of Snakes and Ladders than a straight line.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“Only narcissists and Heroes stood unwavering against the odds. Most rational people got a clue and found their bearings.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“It was funny how you thought you remembered someone. You sketched their face boldly in your mind, but when you saw them again, you realized how far you were from their true likeness. Had he always been that height, for example? Had he moved the way he did, long strides as he reached the table? Had he smiled at her like that? Maybe she’d constructed false memories of him, fake angles.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“Funny how “I love you” never sounded the same in different languages. It lost or gained power. In English, it sounded so plain. In Spanish, it became a promise.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“It’s about what humans need to be happy. Sure, we evolved to live in complex interdependent social groups, but before that, we were nomads, pursuing resource opportunities in an open, sparsely populated landscape. That means for some people, solitude and independence are primary values.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

“People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long-fermented resentments, and obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection