Daryl Gregory Quotes

He wondered what the collective noun was for psychologists: a shortage of shrinks? A confession of counsellors?

Rogue factories on the other side of the border, most of them also on Native American reservations, pumped out millions of cheap, untaxed, generic cigarettes a year. You couldn't blame the Indians. We took their land; they were giving us cancer.

He was upright, so was that holding up?

Graciella's frown was there and gone in an instant. He didn't know how to interpret that. If they were playing poker, it would have telegraphed that she'd picked a bad card, and he would have bet against her. But in the game of Real Women, he was forever a novice.

I've always been a sucker for the beautiful and the batshit.

Look, you can't think of a person like it's one thing, one 'I' that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn't make a decision, it arrives at one.

Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not cannot be objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.

The human egg is a Mrs. Bennet, desperate to marry off her daughters ... It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sperm must be in want of a matching strand of DNA.

Startled awake. Ollie froze for a moment, staring in his direction. The kid scrunched his face and yawned like a bear. I said to Ollie, "It's still Bobby." "Right," she said. She unzipped the bag. There was no lock on the zipper, not even the tiny padlocks they

The question, then, was how long could a human being stay awake? Keith Richards could party for three days straight, but I wasn't sure if he counted as a human being.

Drive safe, dress safe, live safe. Retreat to the safest place of all.

They piled into Irene's Festiva, a car that won the award for most ironic distance between name and driving experience.

Hyperentrepreneurs that make even hardcore capitalists nervous.

The best aunts aren't substitute parents, they're co-conspirators.

Pretending to be normal made life so difficult.

He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully.

"You want one?"

"No thanks. Had a touch of the cancer a few years ago."

"What kind?"

"Prostate."

"I'm not asking you to smoke it in your ass.

A BS in any neuroscience without a master's or PhD was a three-legged dog of a degree: pitiable, adorable, and capable of inspiring applause when it did anything for you at all.

You remember Ernest Angley? TV healer. He'd slap people's foreheads - whap! - and they'd flop over, quivering like fish." She hooted in laughter. "I used to love watching him. It was like professional wrestling for Baptists.

Love at first sight is a myth, but thundering sexual attraction at first sight is hard science.

The doctor unfurled her wings into Maximum Righteousness Mode. The flaming sword was in her hand. She pointed with it like the archangel casting us out of the garden. Get your ass back there!

Fayza leaned in, squinting, as if she didn't hear me correctly: one of the library of power moves that adults used to signal that other adults were fucking idiots.

What I remember are tentacles. Tentacles and teeth.

Everyone in the class turned. On one of the tables, a frog had started to smoke, and the limbs were twitching spasmodically. Dr. Herbert rushed over, clapping his hands. "It's alive!" he cried.

There was a scientist who did not believe in gods or fairies or supernatural creatures of any sort. But she had once known an angel, and had talked to her every day.

She believed that people were captains of their own destiny. He agreed, as long as it was understood that every captain was destined to go down with the ship, and there wasn't a damned thing you could do about it.

The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragments. All we could see of each other
all we could see of ourselves
was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.

You're being parental', I said. 'Go find that squid'.

If this is what it's like to be human, he thought, no wonder the world is so fucked up.

Poor bastard. Literally. His mom was broke, and his dad had abandoned the family years ago.

Was it possible that they could both be so unknown to themselves?

Everyone develops a tolerance to happiness.

For the first time in his life, Stony felt it. It ran like a hot wire, up from his spine, to the base of his skull. His mouth opened on its own.
He wanted to bite. He wanted to bite hard.

God gets the easiest performance reviews.

Every other writer's process is sort of vaguely scary and appalling.

Divine essence?' I said. 'Hey, I'm Fat Boy, I'll possess a guy and make him eat ten pounds of chocolate in one sitting! Yeah, that's divine, that's fucking deep, that's like ... ' I couldn't think what that was like. It was like something, though.

I need that printer," I said. "And the precursor