Charlie Jane Anders

“That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show.”

“A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.”

“What was worse, being crazy or being evil?”

“As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.”

“Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.”

“You turned your guilt into resentment, because that seems easier to face. You won't move on until you turn it back into guilt, and then into forgiveness for yourself.”

“Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.”

“Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.”

“That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else.”

“Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?”

“I hope it's the good kind of dilemma," Reginald broke Patricia's reverie. "Whatever one you're on the horns of."..."I was just thinking," she said. "There are so many scary problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you'd create another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance. We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find another way to handle us."..."I am, as you know, a fan of nature," said Reginald. "And yet, nature doesn't 'find ways' to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It's more that nature's playing field is full of traps.”

“Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.”

“Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all — clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.”

“When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos.”