Michael Bishop Quotes

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.

His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth.

Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?

Tiglathpileser was a human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone.

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

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

Necessary is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention.

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

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.