Michael Bishop Quotes

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

Coercion is the tool of the desperate.

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.

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

Time, as it always does, passed.

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

Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.

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.

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.

Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.

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

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