c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.You'd scream if you had the breath.Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?"I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.
— Tracy Hickman, The Immortals
Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
— Samuel R. Delany
...They are merely scars, not mortal wounds and you must use them to propel you forward.
— Peter David, House of Cards
Don't pick up hitchhikers!"- D. Adams
— Robert Lynn Asprin, Myth-ion Improbable
There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.
— Kevin J. Anderson
The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
Love is the net profit on life.
— Sharon L. Reddy, Paradox Equation: Parts 1 & 2
The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.
— Philip José Farmer
Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
— Arthur C. Clarke, Expedition To Earth
May the gods ignore you.
— Lynda Williams
He holds her with the strength of a million-man army, but with all the tenderness of her heart lying naked in the palms of his hands.
— Laura Kreitzer, Phantom Universe
England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.
— Kage Baker
Niko was a man of few words and flying, sugary snacks. I like that in a human. ~Catcher
— Rob Thurman, Roadkill
Almsgiving is a major tenet of Islam. It's also a kick in the pants of the highest order. Nothing is as cool as skimming off a couple of hundred thousand from some multinational corporation and handing it out to random strangers. Or writing a harmless little virus that makes credit counters "forget" to send a surcharge back to the bank after each purchase. Oh, sure, technically I'm supposed to give away my own money, but whatever. I'm sure Allah gets the spirit of what I'm doing here. 
— Lyda Morehouse, Messiah Node
A brief life burns brightly.
— Stephen Baxter, Exultant
I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.—John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One, “No Exit
— Patrick Di Justo, The Science of Battlestar Galactica
It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice...The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our sue, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern… “My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.
— C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
Brother Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? ...I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!
— Ronald D. Moore
Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, to inconsequntial, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we're up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there's a little splashing on the surface, but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.
— Brian W. Aldiss
A metric fuckton of dumb so epically mind-destroyingly beyond a bad idea that there's not a chance they would go there.
— Andrea K. Höst, Lab Rat One
We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.
— Kevin J. Anderson, Hidden Empire
The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
— Ray Bradbury
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz
— William L.K., The Voice
He felt a psychosomatic rush of emptiness before he spoke. “Since we are getting to the real point, I am not stupid John. And it would be foolish to think me ignorant. Isn’t this about the Science Nation interview? Isn’t this because I mistakenly used the word “soul?” Isn’t this about you and the others thinking somewhere along the lines, I had gained an imaginary soul? We all know when you gain a soul, you lose a mind. Don’t we john?” John hesitated briefly staring at Roma. “I believe so yes. Souls are luxuries for speculative minds. Real scientists can’t afford such luxuries. They have the world to save.”Roma narrowed his eyes. “Or destroy.
— Dew Platt, Roma&retina
... we have created a man with not one brain but two. ... This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. ... The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal -- the only peripheral terminal -- for the new computer. ... And therefore the patient's biological brain, indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and is helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.
— Michael Crichton, The Terminal Man
The sound came again. There was a whistle to it, and a moan. It was almost a hiss, and it could’ve been a strangled gasp. Above all, it was quiet, and it seemed to have no source. It whispered.
— Cherie Priest, Boneshaker
We shall give up the things of childhood -- gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets.
— Norman Spinrad, Riding the Torch
Life is a sewer and we are all but swimmers within it. Smart people do the backstroke. (In other words you gotta have a giggle.)
— Stephen B. Pearl, Tinker's Plague
I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
Where was this written? I wondered. Where in the Talmud or the Koran or the Bible did it say, "Lo, and Satan fetcheth the coffee for the Antichrist and her minions"?
— Lyda Morehouse, Apocalypse Array
My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster.
— Octavia E. Butler
..the happy hum of humanity.
— Arthur C. Clarke
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it
— Warren Ellis
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
— Brian W. Aldiss
Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer
I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
The Scientific Method is a wonderful tool as long as you don't care which way the outcome turns; however, this process fails the second one's perception interferes with the interpretation of data. This is why I don’t take anything in life as an absolute…even if someone can “prove” it “scientifically.
— Cristina Marrero
They knew where they were headed but they didn’t know where they were going. Retina shrugged the thought. Roma complained about the possibility they were walking into a trap. After all, he was one of the scientists that decided Solstice’s fate. Retina was adamant no one knew him. Lorenzo didn’t care about anything much but reaching Zharfar after Retina surgically removed his Unicell Groper. They were headed to Africa in what seemed a semi commercial private plane. Eight people including the pilots travelled. They weren’t supposed to know any more particulars. But Lorenzo’s watch placed the coordinates in both numbers and words. They were in West Africa, country Nigeria, state Osun, and township Isura. None of them had ever heard of it, the town, but they were there. And they had travelled for miles, over highly forested nonresidential areas and mountain peaks before they stopped. Wherever they were going was greatly isolated, Roma thought.
— Dew Platt
The journey is the reward.
— Erik Daniel Shein
There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting.
— Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man
By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around.
— Scott B. Pruden
Yeye shifted in her seat as Roma stared down at her angrily. “There are inter-realm laws I must abide by, that the soul must abide by as well when it comes to an appointed manifestation. Whoever was in the world before can not go into the new world. That identity must be forsaken. It must—”“Forsaken or forgotten?” Roma barked. “Forsaken,” Yeye answered. “Unless you’re putting this soul into a blank state like that of a child, it can not be forgotten. It has to be forsaken. That’s the rule or you get no soul.” “So you’re telling me that this soul will remember but will never be able to be that person it was?” Roma asked. “I’m telling you a new memory must be formed with absolutely no reference to the previous.” “What the freak is that?” Roma asked, visibly agitated. “You can form new memories while holding on to preexisting ones.” Yeye stood. “Yes Roma, you’re right. But you can also form new memories while you are unable to access the previous ones.” “Such it would have a drive that belongs to it but would never be able to access or be forbidden to access it?” Roma asked. Yeye’s voice was low. “I’m afraid that’s the way it is going to have to be.” Roma shook his head vehemently. “Exactly which way is that Yeye. Exactly which way is that in common terms?” Yeye spoke in her most resolute tone yet. “You will never be able to know whether or not this soul is Mara.” Roma gained silence, breathing in and out rapidly. “We’re getting out of this damned Zharfar,” he said as he stormed out.
— Dew Platt, Roma&retina
When the nurse leaves, Doctor Rose mouths, “Act like you’re in pain.” Then she mimics a painful expression in case Summer doesn’t understand. On the contrary, Summer’s an expert at interpreting body language and reading lips. It’s all thanks to her observant nature while enslaved on the Cosmos. Who else could tell that Peter’s discomfort is due to him wearing the same pair of underwear for a week straight? Ah, yes, she always knew when day six and seven approached. She watched the crew member with much amusement as he waddled, pulled wedgies, and scratched his bum relentlessly. Not that anyone else cared to know that little nugget of information.
— Laura Kreitzer, Forsaken Harbor
If you ordered up a whore here, you'd probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?" His eyes lit up for a moment. "I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a whore and a Hershey bar?
— Kage Baker, The Graveyard Game
Brahman and I are buddies.
— Stephen Beam, Galaxy Riff
For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.
— Rudy Rucker
Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.
— E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
Saul's vitals were not human, but familiar:he never told me he was from another world:I never told him I was from his future. 
— Joe Haldeman
You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light!
— Iain Banks, The State of the Art
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
— Philip K. Dick
I hope I died honorably. I have a great deal to atone for. - Eler Nersal
— Lynda Williams
I looked at Victor, my heart swelling from the emotion. “When I die, please do the same ceremony for me,” I whispered, choking up. “This is the most captivating and emotional event I have ever been part of.”“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask somebody else for that because if you die before me I won’t survive it.” He kissed the tip of my nose. I gazed at him with so much love that my heart almost burst out of my chest.
— A.B. Whelan, Valley of Darkness Part 1 & Part 2
Truth or dare...truth ain't fair. Marshal Robert Quantrell - Belle Starr: Dead Man's Hand (work in progress)
— Belinda McBride
I never sleep. Like the dolphin and the spiny anteater, I don't experience REM. Unlike the dreamless mammals, I'm a construct. I am a living program inside a vast network of electronic impulses known as the LINK. In that datastream I've uncovered the meaning of another kind of dreaming--that of a fond hope or aspiration, a yearning, a desire, or a passion. This much I have. When I dream, I dream of Mecca.
— Lyda Morehouse, Fallen Host
It is as it is. Betren son of Bromwell Defender of Delmarath
— Cynthia Willerth, A Matter of Honor
The look in his eyes reminded me of myself. We were both alone in a new environment, trapped by our circumstances, and we both needed to grow up much faster than planned. Who knew that once I’d have something common with a deer.
— A.B. Whelan, Valley of Darkness Part 1 & Part 2
In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there....
— Lois McMaster Bujold
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
— Bruce Sterling, Burning Chrome
The kid is scary.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
— J.G. Ballard
I would wish you gods speed but I don’t want you to waste time looking for him.
— Steve Merrick, The Navigator
It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois.
— Neil Gaiman
This is what happens when an outlaw kidnaps a scholar of myths and legends.
— Doris Egan, Two-Bit Heroes
The ultimate downfall of the computerized holographic receptionist was that there was no amount of flattery, flirtation or chocolate that could convince one to lie for you.
— Scott B. Pruden
... crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time.
— Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man
... but remember that I shall love your sorrow...
— Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man
The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.
— Cordwainer Smith
I have zero respect for knowledge, that’s what computers are for. Imagination is the kicker because imagination can extrapolate, create and solve, Knowledge is just facts and shit. Mostly irrelevant.”Kego O'Grady in The Navigator By Steve Merrick
— Steve Merrick
Vibrations caused by powerful turbines stirred Kathy from a dream centered around a funeral. Her eyes flicked open, face dry, and she had no idea where she was. In her dream, she saw crystalline silver spiders again, weaving their way through the graveyard, leaving trails of silver webs over corpses, binding them for some unknown purpose in the cold dark earth.
— Michael Offutt, Slipstream
[Telzey] took out a pocket edition law library and sat down at the table. She clicked on the library's viewscreen, tapped the clearing and index buttons. Behind the screen, one of the multiple rows of pinhead tapes shifted slightly as the index was flicked into reading position.
— James H. Schmitz, The Universe Against Her
Britain isn't a world power any more. Its just like a zombie in that regard
—  it doesn't know when it's dead - Samson from No Boundaries.
Look in Kego’s defense he was only Nine and a half when he took command of the ship and she had been put way off course by her captain and you lot would all be dead if it wasn’t for him.”Jenny Smith In The Navigator by Steve Merrick
— Steve Merrick
Nothing helps your partner keep his mind on Jesus more than having a sign of His love tanned on your primary erogenous zones.
— Scott B. Pruden
As for you Rose Tyler you gave up on me! That's rude. Is all I am rude and not ginger?" The Doctor
— Grant Battersby
A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.
— Theodore Sturgeon
Meanwhile here I am- Earthborn woman, a mere barbaric maula, geting deeper into Imperial Space with each passing light second. I should be trembling with fear, I suppouse. No. Let the Emperor tremble. Laylah is here!
— Robert Silverberg
Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.
— Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos
Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Arkady looked at the other man. he felt that he was actually seeing him as a physical being for the first time.....He tried to imagine that body with Bella, with any woman, and found the idea...not repulsive exactly, but incomprehensible. How would it work exactly? And how would either of them, knowing nothing of their lover's body, needs and desires, ever be able to satisfy the other?
— Chris Moriarty, Spin Control
For so long considered a second-rate category to other writing genres, Science Fiction should be allotted its true place in literature. The reason Science Fiction is so important is because SF authors create the future. They bring through ideas, technology, and new thought, put it all down in written and spoken word, and then send it out into mass consciousness. When enough people (a critical mass) think about and truly consider the plausibility of a concept, it becomes reality. Think William Gibson, who in 1982's "Burning Chrome" coined "cyberspace". Few grasped the concept at the time, but as the internet took hold in the 1990's, we not only had a word to describe our experience, we had a definition and an understanding, as well. Coincidence?
— Joseph Duda
Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better.
— Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth
To be in a war, you must learn the rules of survival… to win a war, you must break every fucking one of those rules.
— A.J. Vega, Majesty's Offspring
There are limits to human beings and science, and fiction is one way to expose those limits. --Ono Norihiro
— Patrick W. Galbraith, Otaku Spaces
The truth is out there.
— Fox Mulder
…Do not discount the value of luck. It is a hidden and unseen attribute in a man that will save him when nothing else can— learn to embrace it.
— A.J. Vega, Majesty's Offspring
If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.
— China Miéville, Embassytown
Science fiction is the arena of the not-yet, and every science fiction story has this element of not-yet-ness  usually a bit of technology or a scientific discovery that we don't know about in the real world of the present but that might be a possibility in the future.
— Welch Everman
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?
— Ray Bradbury, Yestermorrow
As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.
— David Brin
It was as unsatisfying as a handjob from someone wearing an oven mitt.
— Paul Di Filippo, Fuzzy Dice
Nothing in life is fair except a witnessed duel.
— Lynda Williams
It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.
— Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
This is more than an experience in the shadows of sleep.
— Richard Bunning, Another Space in Time
Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then...Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain...It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time.
— H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
The winged human glanced towards Retina briefly. “It’s okay Dr. Blade. Scientists should never be blown away from the nature of facts.” Roma smiled. “And by scientists, are you one?” “That is dependent on your opinion Dr. Hill. I’m well versed by Dr. Sangha.” Roma moved towards him, narrowing his eyes. “It is my opinion that no respectable scientist will allow himself to be a subject of ridicule by turning in his human DNA to become a freak, a beast or whatever the hell it is you think you are.” The winged human was unaffected. “I’m sure Dr. Hill that freak or beast doesn’t apply.” Roma drew his head back slightly, studying the demeanor of the winged human. “What’s your name?” “I’m Seganus,” he replied humbly. Roma moved a little closer to him wearing a deep frown. “You don’t think the word freak or beast applies?” “No. I don’t think so.” “Is that the carnivorous beaks of the Titanis Walleri I see on you?” “No.” “Can you hold the 360 Degrees field of view of the Woodcock.” “No.” “The long bills of the Australian Pelican?”“No.” “Do you lay the large eggs of the Ostrich?”“Dr. Hill,” Retina cautioned. Lorenzo seemed amused by the situation. He was smiling.“No,” Seganus replied. Roma continued. “Then you’ll say you don’t have those qualities birds posses?”“No.” “You’ll say you’re human?” Seganus blinked before he spoke. “Yes.” Roma moved closer to him. “Then why the freaks are you wearing wings?
— Dew Platt, Roma&retina
Yes, rules are made to be broken -- but ONLY if you have a damn good reason for doing it.
— Kevin Hosey
With biting solemnity he spoke. “What are you holding on to as Mara? Why are you holding on to what does not exist and was once known? Why not let her be dusts to the winds of Teracia, insignificant in the eyes of what Atheists believe?” Teracia was home to the American Spiritualist headquarters and a very large expanse of forestry. Roma, to keep Mara’s last wishes had visited Teracia, against his Atheist believes, to spread her ashes so her soul may roam free. What soared through Roma was more sadness than anger in the moment. But the anger was enough to push him head first into Retina. “How dare you? You stupid son of a bitch…Ahh!” The force that took Roma forward took them over the compliant material that was the railing and they became subject to gravity. The impact resisting, antigravity flooring broke the majority of their fall. And as Roma traveled the approximately fifteen inches resistance flight back in the air, “I’ll kill you,” he told Retina. While Retina was silently thanking Dr. Hunter, a QueXtgen scientist who had just saved their lives without knowing it, for the scientific design of the house, “I’ll kill you…” Roma said as his body touched the floor, before losing consciousness.
— Dew Platt, Roma&retina
why Human should not look at the past?
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.
— Iain Banks, The State of the Art
I love science fiction, always have, always will. But it’s the kind of science fiction that I love which I think is an important distinction.
— Matthew S. Williams
Shadows and light deceived us, but sounds we followed true.
— David  Bowles, The Deepest Green
What was I before the war? It’s hard to remember that far back. But I think maybe I was human.
— A.J. Vega, Majesty's Offspring
What lies beyond the wormhole ... is the devil incarnate.
— Chris Burton, Alpha One: The Jump Pilot
In some very rare cases, an opposite-sex pair was born, and they always mated one another. Disturbing as it might sound, when it did happen, the offspring were invariably gifted. Sera and Trace's sons were noted psych-scientists.
— Belinda McBride, Belle Starr
You people do not have to live like this!" the man pleaded. "We are humans, made in the image of God. No machine has the right to order us around." The man reached inside his box, no bigger than a foot square, and took out a small black book. "Here is the truth. Read it!"Before anyone could act, one of the Sentries aimed its red eye at the babbling man, and shot out a deadly energy ray. With a final shout of defiance, the man fell to the ground, dead. The contents of his container spilling out onto the spaceport's floor. Marcellus looked down at the items, so precious to the man: they were copies of The Koran and The Bible.
— Donald Allen Kirch, The Christ Project
I’m going to see you now Papa… you better run...
— A.J. Vega, Majesty's Offspring
Everything's science fiction until someone makes it science fact
— Marie Lu, Warcross
Science fiction has no ceiling.
— William Donelson
Sustainability before ambition. Okal Rel.
— Lynda Williams
...She wasn't anyone special. She wasn't that brave, that clever or that strong. She was just somebody that felt cramped by the confines of her life. She was just somebody who had to get out. And she did it! She went out past Vega, out past Moulquet and Lambard! She saw places that aren't even there anymore! And do you know what she said? Her most famous quotation? "Anybody could have done it
— Alan Moore, The Ballad of Halo Jones
So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.'She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.
— Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs
I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.
— Voltaire, Micromegas
Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course, I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
I don`t believe on them…but I am positive they exist.
— R.C. Albertini, Chariot 3: Conception
The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
When they explore opportunity cost of black blood I hear ancient corridors survived on the neck of ancient souls Satellite empires, the oversight dark forces
— Omondi Ochuka
There comes a time when a man has to kill his own snakes.
— T.D. Nutt, Serpens Abyss
So many people want to, they need to villainize others. They need a clear bad guy who suffers the consequences of violating their morality. But isn’t this the essence of intolerance?
— Maxime Trencavel, The Matriarch Matrix
Paulo noticed the creature’s swift and frantic breathing and the drop of red staining the ground beneath, but above all he saw the bird’s uppermost eye, wide open and fixed on his. That single eye reflected panic and despair on a scale he had never before witnessed. It was both tiny and enormous, and with every passing moment it seemed to expand, encompassing the trees, the landscape, the sky. That look stilled the wind and darkened the day and, at a glance, transformed a moment of ecstasy into a bottomless pit of guilt."From "The Algorithm of Power", Part 3: The Paulo Fontana Story
— Pedro Barrento, The Algorithm of Power
Do you dream about time travel or do you time travel while you dream? #AzariasTor
— Richard Abbott-Brailey, Azarias Tor: The History Maker
Every dead body that is not exterminated, gets up and kills. The people it kills, get up and kill!
— Dr. James Foster
I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.
— Greg Egan, Axiomatic
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for the planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
AIDEN: DID WE NOT ESTABLISH THIS DURING YOUR FAILED ATTEMPTS ON THE BRIDGE? YOU CANNOT HOPE TO MATCH ME. MY COMPUTATIONAL POWER IS ALMOST INCALCULABLY SUPERIOR TO YOURS. TO ONE SUCH AS MYSELF, YOU ARE THE INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENT OF PROTOZOA.Zhang: True. But I have something you and protozoa don't. AIDEN: AND THAT IS?Zhang: Hands, mother------.
— Jay Kristoff, Amie Kaufman
We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.
— Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
James would only look for music composed and performed by humans. Nowadays people didn’t feel the need to learn to play musical instruments. And why would they, since the sounds they produced could be perfectly generated digitally. Human voices were sample recorded, then modified and remastered by artificial intelligence. Where did our creativity go?
— A.V. Osten, The Head Employee Precedent
My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.
— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Well what would you expect?" she sputtered. "They can call themselves privateers, but we all know they're just pirates with papers.
— Jason Fry, Hunt for the Hydra
Sergeant Tin said it would be easier to just call you Corporal. She said you go back and forth, promoted one day and busted the next.
— Henry V. O'Neil, Live Echoes
And suddenly, the earth was an alien place, and she a voyager without sure destination.
— Rodgers Clemens, The Presence
A journey inward may end in defeatFor life as we know it was made by machines
— Mechina - Impact Proxy
Humanity’s first faster-than-light spacecraft crashed into Pluto and vaporised a significant portion of it. Oops. Pluto’s status as a planet had been a matter of contention since the early twenty-first century and had come close to starting the fourth world war at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Making it even smaller did absolutely nothing to help the situation, and humanity came five minutes, and one hasty phone call, from another world war.
— L. G. Estrella
Science fiction is using an exploration of where we might be, to explore where it seems like we are heading, in order to reveal exactly where we are.
— Unknown
The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.
— William Gibson
We need to give an informative set of criteria for the best explanation. It is very difficult to do so. Here are some factors which should be taken into account
— Michael E Emmering
When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
The pending brahpocalypse/ coup d'état - whatever it was - was much more important than whether a donut-eating Police Officer saw a flying saucer over a gay club or not." - Red Gods Sing.
— Trevor Barton, Red Gods Sing
Well what would you have us do, Jason? Swan into a hardware store without any cash and say “give us your best rack or we’ll set the adorable button-nosed robots on you for bunny-boiler death by cuddling?" Jared Thomas in Red Gods Sing
— Trevor Barton, Red Gods Sing
Scent is like a kiss of time travel which transports one to an ancient memorable occasion.
— Evans Biya
Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).
— Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I trade with you my mind.
— Clifford D. Simak, Time Is the Simplest Thing
Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum.One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust.Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated.The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.
— Greg Egan, Diaspora
Dad takes a step back, one hand still on my shoulder, and reaches into his pocket. He draws out a little blue capsule, and I feel every molecule in my body screaming to run. Dad must catch the panic in my eyes - he squeezes my shoulder and holds out the capsule. "Cas, it's fine. It's going to be fine. This is just in case."Just in case. Just in case the worst happens. The ship falls. Durga fails, I fail, and the knowledge I carry as a Reckoner trainer must be disposed of. That information can't fall into the wrong hands, into the hands of people who will do anything to take down our beasts. So this little capsule holds the pill that will kill me if it comes to that. "It's waterproof," Dad continues, pressing it into my hand. "The pocket on the collar of your wetsuit, keep it there. It has to stay with you at all times." It won't happen on this voyage. It's such a basic mission, gift-wrapped to be easy enough for me to handle on my own. But even holding the pill fills me with revulsion. On all my training voyages, I've never had to carry one of these capsules. That burden only goes to full-time trainers. "Cas." Dad tilts my chin up, ripping my gaze from the pull. "You were born to do this. I promise you, you'll forget you even have it." I suppose he ought to know - he's been carrying one for two decades.It's just a right of passage, I tell myself, and throw my arms around his neck once more.
— Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us
Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world
— Arkady Strugatsky
I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods' worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as the must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.
— Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
From what I can see of humans, you often destroy wonderful things in the pursuit of something that your delusions make you think is more wonderful.
— A.L. Davroe, Nexis