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Connie Willis QUOTES

Connie Willis QUOTES

1 " 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! "

― Connie Willis , Passage

2 " And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London. "

― Connie Willis

3 " Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow. "

― Connie Willis , To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)

4 " 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 , Bellwether

5 " 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 , The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

6 " 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 , Bellwether

7 " It is the end of the world. Surely you could be allowed a few carnal thoughts. "

― Connie Willis , Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)

8 " 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 , Bellwether

9 " To do something for someone or something you loved- England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history- wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth. "

― Connie Willis

10 " Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats. "

― Connie Willis , To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)

11 " It was the Communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren't guilty at all. "

― Connie Willis , The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

12 " Wrong, and wrong agains,' he said. 'The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we seek to make sense of our surroundings, our experiences, ourselves, seeing similarities, parallels, connections. We cannot help it. Even as the mind fails, it goes on trying to make sense of what is happening to it. "

― Connie Willis , Passage

13 " 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 , Bellwether

14 " 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 , Remake

15 " Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change. "

― Connie Willis , The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

16 " One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'. "

― Connie Willis

17 " 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 Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

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

― Connie Willis , To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)

19 " 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 , To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)

20 " You'd help if you could, wouldn't you, boy?" I said. "It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by- "

― Connie Willis , To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)