Tim Powers Quotes

Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?

All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.

Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.

We should all be getting insanity danger pay.

Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error.

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

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?

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.

Banach recalled that one defector had stated, I didn’t abandon the USSR, the USSR abandoned me.
And he recalled the oath he had taken, with perfect sincerity, at the age of eighteen: I will always be ready to come to the defense of my homeland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics…
The what? he thought now. What was that you said? The Roman Empire, was it? The Persian Empire, the Hittites?

There's something you should know about me."
"What's that?"
"I don't know, but you should know it.

“Whats o’clock?”
It wants a quarter to twelve,
And to-morrow’s doomsday.

I think we're dead."
"Maybe." Vickery shook his head. "Would that make a difference?

Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men.

Maybe later," he told her. "Time yet for a hundred indecisions.

Solipsism," said Felise. "I thought that too, for a while, but it was so obvious that my cat didn't think so, didn't think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn't true.