Connie Willis Quotes

Servants don't travel with their employers."
"How do they do without them?"
"They don't.

My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn't have wasted his time looking for an honest man," Shirl said, "he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.

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.

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.

Contrary to popular belief, the computer graphics revolution didn't kill the musical," the prof said. "The musical kicked off," he paused to let the class titter, "in 1965.…
"The musicals, with their contrived storylines, unrealistic song-and-dance sequences, and simplistic happy endings, no longer reflected the audience's world.

It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.

I'm a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don't believe dreams have a 'real' meaning. They're a physical process, and any 'reality' they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.

A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

I’ve never understood why the faces, who have nothing to sell but an original personality, an original face, all try to look like somebody else. But I guess it makes sense. Why should they be different from everybody else in Hollywood, which has always been in love with sequels and imitations and remakes?