Tim Powers quotes

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink. (Tim Powers)
Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans' error.
Tim Powers
The wages of courage is death, lad, but it's the wages of everything else, too.
Tim Powers
It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.
Tim Powers
I've learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you've got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.
Tim Powers
He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack...crack...crack of it was the only sound in the universe.
Tim Powers
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
You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, "that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?” Joe considered it. "Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.” Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn't seem to have heard Joe. "There's so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal... stupefaction. No, that might be bearable-it's greater than the action.
Tim Powers
She chose to reject me!” That wasn't a choice, lad-that was an empty gun saying click.
Tim Powers
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
Love isn't in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway. (Tim Powers)
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
In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they'd been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he'd tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog's leg.
Tim Powers
You're still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you're Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.
Tim Powers
He tried to put more conviction into his voice than he felt, and he mentally cursed any God that there might be, for having made this coming ordeal not only tremendously difficult and dangerous, but possibly pointless too.
Tim Powers
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
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
You protect the ones you love. He clung to the thought. Even if they ignorantly resent you for it.
Tim Powers
Work out your own damnation,” he said breathlessly, "in fear and trembling.
Tim Powers
It's important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like-me.
Tim Powers
The church has become a more...exclusive club since the founder's day, it's clear. No doubt the Devil is more hospitable. (Tim Powers)
People in 1900 didn't think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.
Tim Powers
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
Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.
Tim Powers
He thought about crossing his fingers, but clasped her hand instead.
Tim Powers