John Varley Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then.

John Varley
You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they're new. Otherwise you rust.

John Varley
This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.

John Varley
I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots.

John Varley
She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough.

John Varley
There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness.

John Varley
Religion and science don't mix well, as science likes to observe and draw conclusions—to learn, in other words—and religion cares only about learning the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. They don't need to learn about this world, because they already know. A good way to describe a wasted life, as far as I'm concerned. Religious people already know things, with no more proof than some words in an old book. In short, they're crazy.

John Varley
I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations.

John Varley
Just because Beethoven doesn't sound like currently popular art doesn't mean his music is worthless.

John Varley
I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them.

John Varley
Never trust anybody who says 'trust me'. Except just this once, of course.

John Varley
It's unpleasant to find that what you had thought of as moral scruples suddenly seem not quite so important in the face of a stack of money.

John Varley
It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living.

John Varley
Buildings were just the world's furniture, and he didn't care how it was arranged.

John Varley
If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself.

John Varley
Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn't want to go through it again.

John Varley
But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can't get any more ancient than that.

John Varley
She looked at me askance. Of course I bribed him, Victor. You'd be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?
Yes, I admitted. I don't like bribery.
I'm indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.

John Varley
They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances.

John Varley
What they had going certainly came as near as anyone ever has in this imperfect world to a sane, rational way for people to exist without warfare and with a minimum of politics. In the end, those two old dinosaurs are the only ways humans have yet discovered to be social animals. Yes, I do see war as a way of living with one another; by imposing your will on another in terms so unmistakable that the opponent has to either knuckle under to you, die, or beat your brains out. And if that's a solution to anything, I'd rather live without solutions. Politics is not much better. The only thing going for it is that it occasionally succeeds in substituting talk for fists.

John Varley
We've become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it's time to railroad, there's time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency.

John Varley
She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming a object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.

John Varley