Tim Powers Quotes

You’re still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you’re Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.

Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art.

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.

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!

He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet.

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.”

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.

“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.

The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.

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

“William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. He’ll try to have children—he doesn’t believe any of this.”
“Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.”
“And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped.

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

Every ruler wants to maintain the status quo.

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.

'Allies,'" he explained, "means we agree not to kill each other."
"I knew that," she said. "It just slipped my mind for a second.