Michael Bishop Quotes

What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?

You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one.

Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?

A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing.

Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.

Like all such prophecies, it’s impressive only if not examined too closely.

But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody.

I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative.

Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.

Magistrate, a problem doesn't cease to exist simply because you cease to consider it a problem.
"Very often, Deputy Foutlif, it does.

The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.
"The True Word on what? Everybody's got his own true word, you know."
"On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion."
"No," Zoe said. Not every one of them; just the ones that don't know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.

Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.

Coercion is the tool of the desperate.

Both God and man hold each other in equally beautiful contempt.

The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.