Connie Willis quotes

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. (Connie Willis)
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. View quote
Connie Willis
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? View quote
Connie Willis
Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race. View quote
Connie Willis
Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century. View quote
Connie Willis
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. View quote
Connie Willis
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. View quote
Connie Willis
When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you. View quote
Connie Willis
I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible. View quote
Connie Willis
Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy. View quote
Connie Willis
One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning. (Connie Willis)
Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats. View quote
Connie Willis
The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over. View quote
Connie Willis
And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years. View quote
Connie Willis
No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering. View quote
Connie Willis
One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'. View quote
Connie Willis
There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them. View quote
Connie Willis
It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir. View quote
Connie Willis
I am a Colorado native, and, no, I did not vote for the anti-gay amendment or the same-sex marriage ban, and I am not a member of a militia. View quote
Connie Willis
Nobody deserves this. "Please,” she prayed, and wasn't sure what she asked. Whatever it was, it was not granted. View quote
Connie Willis
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. (Connie Willis)
Servants don't travel with their employers.” "How do they do without them? View quote
Connie Willis
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. View quote
Connie Willis
It's the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity. View quote
Connie Willis
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. View quote
Connie Willis