Michael Bishop Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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