Hella Quotes

“Timing. It’s about timing.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Don’t volunteer anything. Let the other person do all the talking. Most people can’t stand silence, so they have to fill it up with words.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Ahead in the distance, scattered clusters of pink-trees waved in the wind. They stuck out of the yellow sea, towering thirty or forty meters high. The pink-trees are very thin, they don’t have low branches, only high ones with broad leaves of orange and red, sometimes shading all the way down to deep purple, sometimes so dark they look black. But their long necks are mostly pink that is why they are called pink- trees.

They aren’t really trees. Even though they are rooted, they’re part animal, and instead of bark they have layers of pale skin, thin as paper.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Let’s talk about you. What do you think about? What do you want? What do you see around you?”

“Why do you want to talk about that?”

“Because, Kyle, I have been surrounded with all kinds of human beings-smart, stupid, pragmatic, dogmatic, generous, selfish, far-seeing, short-sighted, insightful, thoughtless, emotional, tone-deaf, passionate, detatched-but never anyone quite like you. I’m curious about you.”

I thought about it. “A lot of people are curious about me. When I was little, the doctors ran all kinds of tests. Until Mom told them I’m not an experiment and they had to stop.”

“I know you’re not. I looked up your medical records. Their diagnoses were more about explaining the way you are than understanding who you are.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“We’ll never really tame this girl. We’ll just learn to live with her.” She used to say that a lot, even after I kept reminding her, “I’m not Kylee, I’m Kyle! I’m not a girl anymore. I’m a boy now.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Questions, all the questions, everything was a question and there were so few answers.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Show them the mysteries of Hella, that’s the real beauty of this world.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Beautiful is mysterious. It tells us that there’s so much more than what we’re seeing or learning. And that’s why we’re drawn to it. Because we want to know the part we’re not seeing or hearing.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Hella isn’t easy, but Captain Skyler says life isn’t easy. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Death is what you do if you’re not up for the challenge.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Hating someone is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. It all sounds very good, but it’s a lot easier to say it than to do it.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“It was almost as if they were afraid the grass would grow so tall around us we’d never get out. Some people say you can actually see the grass growing. You can certainly hear it, an endless whispering. Sometimes, you can almost make out the worlds.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Does blue have a smell?”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“The land is an endless plain of yellow and pink. Even the slightest whisper of wind sends ripples of color shimmering across the land.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Impatience can be fatal.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Mom is old-fashioned about babies. Maybe it’s because she was born male, but changed so she could experience her own pregnancy with Jamie, and then with me. I asked her why she never changed back and she said she was having more fun this way, she said I should make up my own mind…”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“When I was little, Jamie and I used to watch movies every Seven-day, almost all morning long. Sometimes we would have friends over. We liked old movies best because we would make it a contest to see who could find the most mistakes. The obvious one was the “Earth-like planet.” You don’t get points for that one, it was too obvious. Jamie liked to say, “There are no Earth-like planets. There are only lazy writers.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“He says that cooking is gift-giving. Every meal is art, but you eat the art, so you have to start again just a few hours later, but that means you get to give another gift, so cooking is the best way of saying, “I love you,” over and over, every day.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“It suddenly struck me-this was HARLIE showing off what he could do, his way of impressing everybody, his way of convincing people that he could handle complex problems that required a lot of fast processing.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“I think she had a lot of history that she wished she didn’t. As near as I can tell, Earth is a terrible place, and I’m glad we don’t live there.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“When Mom was a boy, she looked a lot different. I saw some old pictures once of my dad, and he had his arm around a boy who looked a little like Mom, but his hair was longer. Mom doesn’t say much about life on Earth, so I guess it wasn’t a very happy home for her. Like most everybody else, she and Dad left because they thought they could have a better life somewhere else.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“I don’t know why Jamie wanted to change, I think it’s because he wanted to be like his dad. I know I wanted to change because I wanted to be like Jamie.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Stop acting like a Terran. Be a Hellan.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Sometimes I just want everything to stop for a bit and leave me alone in my head. Even the noise would be quiet by comparison. But migration is a mad dash. We have to go as fast as we can.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Politics is people-and people aren’t logical. I prefer logic. It’s simpler.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“I don’t get revenge. Hurting back just means two people are hurt.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Captain Skyler thinks Councilor Layton is always trying to divide people so he can control them, but Councilor Layton says that Captain Skyler wants to keep everybody in one place so he can control them. It’s an argument I’m not sure I understand.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“The argument has never been resolved and maybe it never will be.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“I don’t understand hook-ups, but I don’t like touching very much, so maybe that’s why.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“J’mee was a friend of Charles Dingillian, the boy who made the music.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“It’s a private thing, that even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t talk about it because it makes people uncomfortable to know I have a super-power. That’s what Jamie calls it. A super-power. I still call it the noise.”
― David Gerrold, Hella