Tim Powers Quotes

It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.

He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.

People are so tasty when they’re truly embittered, truly despairing...and that’s when they come to Sevatividam. They can’t stand the bitter rain, so they run in under one of the two awnings—religion or dissipation—and guess who’s waiting for them under both awnings at once...

“Under what circumstances do you think you might want to…return to the real world?”
The real world and I never did get along, she thought.
“I can’t imagine,” she said.

Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Maybe then I’ll be ashamed.

When the story was finished, Orcrist shook his head wonderingly.
“The Fates must have something planned for you, Frank.”
“I hope it’s something quiet.”

And you've never married."
"I don't know any women well enough to hate 'em that much.

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?

He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack...crack...crack of it was the only sound in the universe.

Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?

Terracotta says people can’t help what they do, any more than a rock rolling down a hill can. The rock might think it has a choice about rolling left or right, just like people think they choose what they do, but really it’s all just physics.

You ever notice, Joe," he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, "that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?"
Joe considered it. "Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing."
Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn't seem to have heard Joe. "There's so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal...stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it's greater than the action.

Finehouse relaxed in his own seat. They had all certainly failed.
But maybe sometimes, he thought, it’s a good thing, on the whole, to have closed a knife that someone else had opened.

Now she was giving him a worried look. “Say something sane.”
He smiled bleakly, his eyes on the cars ahead. “You and I are not normal people.”
“Huh.” She shook her head. “That’s not sane, that’s just true.”

Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?