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Tim Powers

100 quotes

“It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, “before she became a bruja.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hey,” Bozzaris said, “nobody’s human.” It was an old Mossad line, a mixture of “nobody’s perfect” and “I’m only human.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s me, that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?” “One future, not the future. There isn’t any the future.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re going to have a séance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass.” “First sensible remark all night,” said Charlotte.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. He’ll try to have children—he doesn’t believe any of this.” “Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.” “And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She chose to reject me!” That wasn’t a choice, lad—that was an empty gun saying click.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?” She smiled faintly. “Yes.” “I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doesn’t she read chicken entrails?” “Oh! No, astrology.” “Same sort of thing.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past,” she repeated. “It’s always out there, isn’t it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What’s the use of knowing what time it is, if it’s always changing? And it’s always later!”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She did love us. Does.” “She loves you the way a drowning person loves somebody they can push down and climb on top of.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Did he say who he was?” asked Scott. “I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Allies,’” he explained, “means we agree not to kill each other.” “I knew that,” she said. “It just slipped my mind for a second.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He fought to think rationally. Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Terracotta says people can’t help what they do, any more than a rock rolling down a hill can. The rock might think it has a choice about rolling left or right, just like people think they choose what they do, but really it’s all just physics.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe later,” he told her. “Time yet for a hundred indecisions.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we’re dead.” “Maybe.” Vickery shook his head. “Would that make a difference?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Guesses based on guesses are of no value.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now she was giving him a worried look. “Say something sane.” He smiled bleakly, his eyes on the cars ahead. “You and I are not normal people.” “Huh.” She shook her head. “That’s not sane, that’s just true.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So what do you, you know, do,” she asked, “in Barstow?” Her voice was resolutely light. “Beside talk to ghosts?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where’s the sane world?” Castine asked as she followed him around to the front of the Saturn. “I used to live there. I think I still have pictures.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Banach recalled that one defector had stated, I didn’t abandon the USSR, the USSR abandoned me. And he recalled the oath he had taken, with perfect sincerity, at the age of eighteen: I will always be ready to come to the defense of my homeland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics… The what? he thought now. What was that you said? The Roman Empire, was it? The Persian Empire, the Hittites?”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should all be getting insanity danger pay.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finehouse relaxed in his own seat. They had all certainly failed. But maybe sometimes, he thought, it’s a good thing, on the whole, to have closed a knife that someone else had opened.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under what circumstances do you think you might want to…return to the real world?” The real world and I never did get along, she thought. “I can’t imagine,” she said.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn’t in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.” Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. “Damn you,” he said wryly. “Then why do I want to, half the time?” Aurelianus shrugged. “It’s the nature of the species. There’s a part of a man’s mind that can only relax and go to sleep when he’s with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.” He grinned. “No equilibrium is possible. If you don’t want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and lock away in a cellar that one insistent one.” Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. “I’m used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,” he said. “I’ll stay on the seesaw.” Aurelianus bowed. “You have that option, sir.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun. Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill...But be willing to die for your choice.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rivas smiled, remembering his response to his first taking of the Jaybird sacrament—while the rest of the recovering communicants had been praising the Lord Jaybush and making sure they knew when the sacrament would be administered again so as not to miss it, young Gregorio Rivas, though stunned, exhausted and glad to have found shelter and company, was coldly appraising the situation. He didn’t doubt that the mysterious Norton Jaybush was certainly more than a man and possibly a god, but the prospect of abandoning his individuality in order to “merge with the Lord” was profoundly repugnant to him.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is very pretty,” said Elizalde... “It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.” “It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?” “I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you get to where I am—” “I’ll never get to where you are. I’ll make better choices.” “Choices! You don’t get choices, you get...situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you’ve got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.’ You’re a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it’s got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don’t. You don’t have free will, sonny.” “Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—” “Bullshit. If—” The older Marrity was panting. “If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every ‘choice’ you’d make in any moral quandary.” Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn’t have anticipated talking to me—he must have cooked it up for his own solace. “Laplace’s determinist manifesto,” came another man’s languid voice from the background. “it overlooks Heisenberg’s uncertainty.” “Okay,” said the older Marrity furiously, “then it’s probability and statistics that dictate what we’ll do! But it’s not—” “It’s a sin,” said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images—hugging her, holding her hand—and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now. “Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!” exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. “‘Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin?’”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source