We would lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over. Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
The good people of Hyperion have done nothing to foist their religious opinions on me, so I see no reason to offend them with my proselytizing.
Father Duré, Hyperion (Dan Simmons)
I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.
I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.
I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (via p4intingfl0w3rs)
If Hal went all out, he could win anyone of [the mathematical games]; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke)
this just tickles me. it’s so true, though, we feign a lot of ignorance about the capabilities of our electronic friends. the credit we give them and the credit we don’t is, I’m sure, a fascinating study.
If there’s a Venn diagram circle labelled Utterly Bonkers, and another labelled Deeply Profound, I’m happy to live at the place they intersect.
Neil Gaiman
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E.L. Doctorow (via AdviceToWriters)
The more serious you are as a writer, the more you feel yourself an outsider—that you’ll never be someone who is going to organize the world and transform it in a logical way; you’re never going to think in any kind of politically logical way, and you’re never going to really have any power.
William Kennedy (via amandaonwriting)
I really don’t know what ‘I love you’ means. I think it means ‘don’t leave me here alone.’
Neil Gaiman (via jesslycorson)
We’ve all got a head full of ghosts and gods and it behooves us to listen to them, to let them out and play on the page, to use the madness granted to us rather than deny it and walk the safe and sane line.
500 Ways to Be a Better Writer, by Chuck Wendig