Michael Bishop Quotes

What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.

Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.
“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.

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.

Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced.

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

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

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

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

Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?
"No, not if you're narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I'm too old for pointless fairy tales.

Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.
"The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate."
"Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the 'natural' process; consequently, you shouldn't be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.

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

Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.

He forgave these Tropemen, then felt contempt for himself for the presumption of extending forgiveness, then forgave again, then cursed his own vanity, forgave once more, condemned his presumption, and at last forgave even himself.

Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?

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.