Connie Willis Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Finch picked up one of the ancient fax-mags and brought it over to me. "I don't need anything to read," I said. "I'll just sit here and eavesdrop along with you." "I thought you might sit on the mag," he said. "It's extremely difficult to get soot out of chintz.

Connie Willis
Management'll never go for it. First, it's live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it's something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.

Connie Willis
I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

Connie Willis
That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

Connie Willis
Nobody deserves this. Please, she prayed, and wasn't sure what she asked.
Whatever it was, it was not granted.

Connie Willis
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

Connie Willis
What's going on? I whispered to Gina.
Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do, she murmured back. So they've invented a new acronym.

Connie Willis
People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.

Connie Willis
It's the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.

Connie Willis
One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.

Connie Willis
The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you've all been exposed. Why shouldn't I give up hope?
God has not abandoned us utterly, he said. Agnes is safe in his arms.
Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.

Connie Willis
Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

Connie Willis
It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances.

Connie Willis
TO ALL THE ambulance drivers firewatchers air-raid wardens nurses canteen workers airplane spotters rescue workers mathematicians vicars vergers shopgirls chorus girls librarians debutantes spinsters fishermen retired sailors servants evacuees Shakespearean actors and mystery novelists WHO WON THE WAR.

Connie Willis
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?

Connie Willis
Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

Connie Willis
No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

Connie Willis
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.

Connie Willis
You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

Connie Willis
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?

Connie Willis
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?

Connie Willis
The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

Connie Willis
There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.

Connie Willis
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.

Connie Willis
They're absolutely necrotic, aren't they? Colin whispered behind his order of service.
It's late twentieth century atonal, Dunworthy whispered back. It's supposed to sound dreadful.

Connie Willis
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.

Connie Willis
Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

Connie Willis
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.

Connie Willis
If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.

Connie Willis
I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.

Connie Willis