Top 15 Tim Powers Quotes

“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.

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.

We should all be getting insanity danger pay.

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?

Where's the sane world?" Castine asked as she followed him around to the front of the Saturn. "I used to live there. I think I still have pictures.

So what do you, you know, do," she asked, "in Barstow?" Her voice was resolutely light. "Beside talk to ghosts?

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.”

Guesses based on guesses are of no value.

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

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

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.

He fought to think rationally.
Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves.

The terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart.

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

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—