John Scalzi Quotes

Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think - and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking - that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love." When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER."

Jared, allow me to share with you my philosophy of human beings. It can be summed up in four words: I like good people.

I’m not sure I like their plan for converting us to their religion, seeing as it involves dying and all.

“I didn’t say that,” Szilard said, in a tone that implied that perhaps he had.

Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults.

I have drinks," Hanson said, coming up behind Duvall.
"Why, Jimmy," Duvall said. "That makes you my new favorite person.

Empires of conquest don’t last, Administrator Perry. They hollow out from within, from the greed of rulers and the endless appetite for war.

When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed.

The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time.
You can’t stop aging. Gene therapies and replacement organs and plastic surgery give it a good fight. But it catches up with you anyway. Get a new lung, and your heart blows a valve. Get a new heart, and your liver swells up to the size of an inflatable kiddie pool. Change out your liver, a stroke gives you a whack. That’s aging’s trump card; they still can’t replace brains.

When you control communication, you can hide anything you want.

Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.

I had never seen so many old people in one place at one time. Neither had Harry. “It’s like Wednesday morning at the world’s biggest Denny’s,” he said.

You don’t win by getting through all your life not having done anything.

Unlike Agents Vann and Shane here, who are being wholly disingenuous, you might be speaking out of genuine ignorance and not just your usual levels of casual obstructionism.

It's Charlie's soul," he repeated. "Or more accurately, it's a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin.