Charlie Jane Anders Quotes

Laurence kept sneaking looks under the table at his propped-open copy of Have Space Suit - Will Travel. He was already halfway through the book.

If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day.

I mean, we're grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we've grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it's probably healthy. I mean, little kids don't have to make decisions, unless something's very wrong. Maybe you can't make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much. You know?

Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills.

Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it's going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What's actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It's more about what's going to happen between the characters and what's taking place in the story.

Believe me, there's nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.

If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.

I hope it's the good kind of dilemma," Reginald broke Patricia's reverie. "Whatever one you're on the horns of."
...
"I was just thinking," she said. "There are so many scary problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you'd create another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance. We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find another way to handle us."
...
"I am, as you know, a fan of nature," said Reginald. "And yet, nature doesn't 'find ways' to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It's more that nature's playing field is full of traps.

Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violence. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.

It's his life. One tends to privilege personal insights in such matters.

Stop giving Doctor Who answers! Tell me the truth!

Genres are like the surface of the ocean. There are waves and things moving, but you don't instantly see all the reefs and ecosystems that's happening beneath the surface.

There are no requirements when you're using a particular genre. It's not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work.

I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel.

Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?

every time you solve a problem you'd cause another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance? We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find other ways to handle us.

But the real point is, how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses?

I have a pretty reasonably shrewd idea of where we go from here," said Dirrp. "At least, a sort of a notion.

We don't need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It's how we justify killing each other.

The trap that can be ignored is no trap.

Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don't get it. You can't believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you're just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.

Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all - clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.

People who told you to "think fast" were always those who thought much more slowly than you did.

Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.

There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars.

When it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. - Fairy Werewolf vs. Zombie Vampire

And at the last, a war between magic and science that would leave the world in ashes. At the center of all this were a man and a woman, who were still children now.

Loose ends are cool... Loose ends mean that you are still living your life. The person who dies with the most loose ends wins.

Your friend would control nature," said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. "A witch must serve nature.

The bookstore had no musty "old books" smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.

Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets.

He found some dignity in the back pocket of his newly acquired pants and walked up into the main apartment, only tripping once. Or twice.

Listen to yourself, hear your own footsteps, your breaths, your heartbeats, oh, how many rhythms you make as you come and go! you are an orchestra.

And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.

Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.

You celebrated the small victories, and you dreamed of the big ones to come.

A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.

That's because our parents pick out our shoes," said Patricia. "Just wait until we're grown up. Our shoes will be insane.

Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier.

I am unflappable," Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he'd thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.

I showed my magic to a civilian one time, and it got ugly.

He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.

When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn't do what he liked. The

People here are not accustomed to seeing economic disputes settled with guns, but every economy runs on bullets, one way or another.

Boredom is the mind's scar tissue.

Society is the choice between freedom on someone else's terms and slavery on yours.

As Kevin listed these moments, she could see them with perfect clarity: all the missed cues and deflections, all the abortive moments of intimacy. All this time, she had been thinking of him as the one with commitment issues. Somewhere along the line, she had become an asshole.

You never learned the secret," said Roberta. "How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn't think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They're all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you've chosen to torture all of us instead. That's the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can't stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It's like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It's nothing personal.

You turned your guilt into resentment, because that seems easier to face. You won't move on until you turn it back into guilt, and then into forgiveness for yourself.

Discovering a new phobia was like the opposite of falling in love.

The only thing that makes life tolerable is that people forget most of the stupid things I say as soon as I finish saying them.

This time, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to cure him. Because why not? It would be so easy.

He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity.

You're going to, what, just walk down to Best Buy and get a time machine off the rack?

You have two options: to make them respect you, or to become invisible. [...] Find ways to make them see what you're capable of. [...] Or try to blend into the shadows as much as possible. They can't hurt what they can't see.

Worry is often a symptom of imperfect information.

Someone who doesn't care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

Palm Strike's main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies.

Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.

All this time as a mad scientist why didn't he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life.

When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos.

Every human can be a wizard.

Serafina was late for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown.