Tim Powers Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.

Tim Powers
Trusting Merlin is like giving a migrant scorpion a lift inside your hat.

Tim Powers
Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans' error.

Tim Powers
Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.

Tim Powers
He thought about crossing his fingers, but clasped her hand instead.

Tim Powers
He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?

Tim Powers
Whats o'clock?
It wants a quarter to twelve,
And tomorrow's doomsday.

Tim Powers
The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

Tim Powers
Say that again after you've been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Maybe then I'll be ashamed.

Tim Powers
You ever notice, Joe, he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?
Joe considered it. Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.
Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn't seem to have heard Joe. There's so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal... stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it's greater than the action.

Tim Powers
Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player's... luck.

Tim Powers
Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.

Tim Powers
I'm really willing to try to believe you're not crazy, but you gotta help me a little, you know?

Tim Powers
The wages of courage is death, lad, but it's the wages of everything else, too.

Tim Powers
All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale's whole life.

Tim Powers
It struck Duffy that a touch of hysteria had sharpened the good fellowship tonight, as if the night wind whistling under the eaves carried some pollen of impermanence, making everyone nostalgic for things they hadn't yet lost.

Tim Powers
It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.

Tim Powers
He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack... crack... crack of it was the only sound in the universe.

Tim Powers
I've learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you've got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.

Tim Powers
Which persepective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?

Tim Powers
You're still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you're Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.

Tim Powers