Connie Willis Quotes

I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?

One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.

In my log, there's nothing worse than working for a government with the guilts. All we were doing on Boohte was surveying the planet, but Big Brother didn't want anybody accusing them of “ruthless imperialist expansion” and riding roughshod over the indidges the way they did when they colonized America.
So they set up all these rules to “preserve planetary ecosystems” (which was supposed to mean we weren't allowed to build dams or kill the local fauna) and “protect indigenous cultures from technological contamination” (which was supposed to mean we couldn't give ’em firewater and guns), and stiff fines for breaking the rules.
Which is where they made their first mistake, because they paid the fines to the indidges, and Bult and his tribe knew a good thing when they saw it, and before you know it we’re being fined for making footprints, and Bult’s buying technological contamination right and left with the proceeds.

How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant."
"Yes, miss," he said wearily.
"You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters."
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, "All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary."
"Plebeian?" Tossie said, bright pink. "How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed." She pointed imperiously at the house. "Pack your things immediately."
"Yes, miss," Baine said. "E pur si muove."
"What?" Tossie said, bright red with rage. "What did you say?"
"I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely," he said calmly.
"You are not in a position to speak to me at all," Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. "Leave at once."
"I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it," Baine said seriously. "I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.

Fifty-nine," Mr. Mowen said. "That's too many coincidences to just be a coincidence.

Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast bifallen us.

Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?

We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash.

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?

He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket.

That makes no sense," I said.
"This is the Victorian era," she said. "Women didn't have to make sense.

And why take a chance on a new movie when they can do a sequel or a copy or a remake of something they already own? And while we are at it, why not star remakes in the remake? Hollywood, the ultimate recycler!

“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.

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

Why is it," Joss said, "that whenever I find you, you are always about to hop in bed with my employer?