Hella Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Timing. It’s about timing.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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, but she said I should make up my own mind. Mom says it’s a good thing for people to know both sides. It makes people happier. It also makes them better partners, but she didn’t explain that, she said I’d understand it better when I got older. Sometimes I wonder how old I will have to be to understand everything. But I think she meant that people who’ve been both male and female usually have better sex. That’s what the noise said.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Jamie says we’re the most dangerous species on the planet. Especially to each other. That’s what happened on Earth and if we’re not careful, it’ll happen here. Jamie didn’t figure that out for himself. He was telling me what he overheard Captain Skyler say about Councillor Layton, Marley’s dad. Mom doesn’t like the Councilor for a different reason. She thinks he’s a bad parent.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“People who’ve never been out in the grass don’t get it. I didn’t understand what Jamie was talking about until I stood in the middle of a furrow, looking around at this very narrow world, a shadow valley with only a strip of sky above to remember there’s a horizen somewhere.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“It wasn’t hard work. It was methodical. I’m good at methodical stuff, so I didn’t mind. But other people do. They think it’s a dirty job. I wondered if this was the reason Captain Skyler had brought me along, so no one else would have to do it. But I’m a scientist. I think it’s exciting. Most of science is gathering a lot of fact and looking for patterns.

And it’s not a dirty job.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“There’s this general feeling in the Hella Colony that we’ll never conquer the planet if we hide behind the fences of Summerland Station. So we have to go ourselves, smell the air and taste the world. We have to feel the dirt between our fingers. If we are ever going to make this planet ours, we have to give up our fear of it and get into a genuinely courageous relationship. That’s what Captain Skyler says.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

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

“Humans haven’t been on Hella long enough. We can vaccinate ourselves against the things we know are out there and all the things we think are out there, but we can’t protect ourselves against all the things that might be out there that we don’t know.”
― David Gerrold, Hella

“Hella is only a little dangerous. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being instantly fatal-like the surface of Luna, where I’ve never been, but I’ve read about it-Hella is only a three, which is equal to some parts of Earth. It’s safe to go outside without protective gear if you stay out of the sun, if you keep your breathing steady and shallow, and if you don’t drink any water you didn’t bring with you.”
― 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

“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

“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