Connie Willis
30 quotes
Biography
Constance Elaine Trimmer "Connie" Willis is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won more major genre awards than any other writer, including eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards.
"That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!"
"Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?"
"When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?"Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?"You don't get ideas. Ideas get you."
"I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?"
"A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key."
"He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket."
"Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?"
"“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”"
"“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”"
"One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite."
"“Why is it,” Joss said, “that whenever I find you, you are always about to hop in bed with my employer?”"
"It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity."
"Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century."
"It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers."
"Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast bifallen us."
"Ah, Hollywood, where everybody wants to be in the movies and nobody’s ever bothered to watch one."
"I’ve never understood why the faces, who have nothing to sell but an original personality, an original face, all try to look like somebody else. But I guess it makes sense. Why should they be different from everybody else in Hollywood, which has always been in love with sequels and imitations and remakes?"
"And why take a chance on a new movie when they can do a sequel or a copy or a remake of something they already own? And while we are at it, why not star remakes in the remake? Hollywood, the ultimate recycler!"
"We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash."
"Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct."
"There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense."
"Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race."
"Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?"
"“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”"
"Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else—cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments—as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time."