If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do. Seriously, they are not your friend. This is a tip I am giving you for free.
Fear isn’t the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential.
Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live.
I thought this was a matter of some urgency, Harry.” “It is,” I said. “But I fell from the sky today. I could use a couple of waffles.
This novel took me rather longer than usual to write, for a number of reasons but one big one being simply that 2017 was a raging trash fire of a year, filled with horrible people trying to do horrible things and often succeeding. It’s harder to bear down creatively when the world is burning.
The trick is not to find the story of the century. You won’t miss that story when it happens. No one will miss it. The trick is to find the story of the day and for that day make whoever reads it or hears it care about it so intensely that it doesn’t leave them. Then it becomes a story of their life. Maybe even the story of their life.
You can’t afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace.
Are we there yet?” I asked Joshua. “No,” Joshua said. “Are we there yet?” I said. “No.” “Are we there yet?” “No.” “Are we there yet?” “Yes,” Joshua said. “Stop the car.
It’s war, you jackasses,” Keyes snapped. “I’m sorry it’s not terribly convenient or comfortable for you.
What was your job back on Earth? I’ve always been curious. I taught eighth-grade math in Tallahassee. Huh, I said. That’s not what I expected. Are you kidding? Powell said back. You try teaching algebra to a bunch of little shitheads for thirty-eight years straight. The way I figure it I’ve got about another decade before my rage from that gets entirely burned up.
It’s the end of civilization as we know it. And it’s going to be great for business.
Oh for God’s sake how divine can I be? My feet hurt, I have gas and I need to pee.
And so we learn how simple it is to change the history of the universe,” Sorvalh said. “All you need is for every other thing to have gone so horribly wrong.
There’s nothing like sharing menarche with a billion hermaphrodites. I think it was everyone’s first time.
Virtue signaling’ is a phrase the dim and bigoted use when they want to discount other people expressing the idea that it would be nice if we could all be essentially and fundamentally decent to each other.
This brings me back to my question about my karma,” Wilson said. “You probably set kittens on fire,” Schmidt said. “And the rest of us were probably there with you, with skewers.
This is my first time working with a human,” Werd said, to Wilson. “How’s it going so far?” Wilson asked. “Not bad,” Werd said. “You’re kind of ugly, though.” “I get that a lot,” Wilson said. “I bet you do,” Werd said. “I won’t hold it against you.” “Thanks,” Wilson said. “But if you smell, I’m pushing you out an airlock,” Werd said.
Is it painful?” the groundskeeper asked. “I am asking for science.
You’re all so busy tending to your own personal tree that you don’t look around to see that the forest is on fire.
It is sort of remarkable to me how much grief can well up when a pet dies, until one remembers that they are in fact people, who just happen not to be human.