Michael Bishop

“Time, as it always does, passed.”

“Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.”

“They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river.”

“You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one.”

“Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.”

“Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.”

“Necessary is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention.”

“A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing.”

“He forgave these Tropemen, then felt contempt for himself for the presumption of extending forgiveness, then forgave again, then cursed his own vanity, forgave once more, condemned his presumption, and at last forgave even himself.”

“Like all such prophecies, it’s impressive only if not examined too closely.”

“Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.”

““Magistrate, a problem doesn’t cease to exist simply because you cease to consider it a problem.””Very often, Deputy Foutlif, it does.””

“Both God and man hold each other in equally beautiful contempt.”

““Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?”“No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.””

“But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody.”

“The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.”

“Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced.”

““Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.”“The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.”“Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.””

“Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?”

“Coercion is the tool of the desperate.”