Connie Willis Quotes
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'That makes no sense,' I said.'This is the Victorian era,' she said. 'Women didn’t have to make sense.'
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'What’s going on?' I whispered to Gina.'Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don’t have enough to do,' she murmured back. 'So they’ve invented a new acronym.'
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Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?
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Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else-cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments-as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time.
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'The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?''God has not abandoned us utterly,' he said. 'Agnes is safe in his arms.'Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.
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If they were part of the self-correction (i. e., of the space-time continuum) what did that do to the notion of free will? Or was free will part of the plan as well?
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The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.
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'Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast bifallen us.'
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It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers.
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You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about.
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Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.
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Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.
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'Servants don’t travel with their employers.''How do they do without them?''They don’t.'
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There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense.
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It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.
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Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.
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Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.
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'They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?' Colin whispered behind his order of service.'It’s late twentieth century atonal,' Dunworthy whispered back. 'It’s supposed to sound dreadful.'
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'My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,' Shirl said, 'he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.'
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Nobody deserves this. 'Please,' she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked.Whatever it was, it was not granted.