Michael Bishop Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.

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

They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river.

Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.

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.

Time, as it always does, passed.

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

God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is.

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

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

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