Tim Powers Quotes

She’s probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she’ll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she’ll just want to return to the selfless haze?

Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.

An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.

I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—

By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong.

She chose to reject me!"
That wasn't a choice, lad—that was an empty gun saying click.

The landlord crossed himself when they checked in, but an English ten-pound note for a week’s lodging overcame whatever superstitious misgivings the man may have had.

What was that building?" Thomas asked, leaning on the coping, and staring out at the conflagration.
"Oh, a city office bombed by radicals," Spencer answered, "or a radicals' den bombed by city officers. I just hope it doesn't spread real far on this wind.

After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?”
She smiled faintly. “Yes.”
“I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”

Some people, he thought, simply have no will to survive—they’re walking hors d’oeuvres waiting for someone who can spare the time to devour them.

When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face.

How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?

Love isn’t in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway.

I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past," she repeated. "It's always out there, isn't it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What's the use of knowing what time it is, if it's always changing? And it's always later!

When you get to where I am—"
"I'll never get to where you are. I'll make better choices."
"Choices! You don't get choices, you get...situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you've got at the time, not some hovering 'soul.' You're a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it's got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don't. You don't have free will, sonny."
"Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—"
"Bullshit. If—" The older Marrity was panting. "If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every 'choice' you'd make in any moral quandary."
Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn't have anticipated talking to me—he must have cooked it up for his own solace.
"Laplace's determinist manifesto," came another man's languid voice from the background. "it overlooks Heisenberg's uncertainty."
"Okay," said the older Marrity furiously, "then it's probability and statistics that dictate what we'll do! But it's not—"
"It's a sin," said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images—hugging her, holding her hand—and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now.
"Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!" exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. "'Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin?'