John Varley Quotes

The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible.

If it's not worth making beautiful," Valiha said, "it's not worth making.

No matter how tough you think you are, thought you were, you haven't been around long enough to be tested in many, many ways.

A toast! To the road! May it lead to adventure and carry us safely back home.

There were millions of Earth men and women who bought the Earth cultures big lies, and they died just as unhappy as you are now. And I suggest to you that it's a foolish thing.

They eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea
all at once. The turd look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.

But I don't believe in heroes anymore. I just believe in people coping with their lives as best they can. You do what you have to do, and in some ways you have no more choice about it than a rock has about falling from a high place.

If she must face the fact that she was fearful, she would also face the fear and overcome it.

All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-and-Baileyest, rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to have been a part of it.

We both had to reject the concept of life after death, even if we weren't brought up to believe in it, because all human cultures are steeped in the idea.

Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.

She knew for a fact, for instance, that what the Polo sisters did behind the closed doors of their adjoining rooms was still illegal in Alabama.

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

Yes, but what is it good for? What does it mean?" Her look was full of pity. "If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.

River burial had a certain rustic poetry, but Ophion cared not at all about preserving the decency of the dead. The river deposited Psaltery on a mud flat three kilometers downstream. When they passed her ruined body, the Titanides did not even glance at it. Chris could not look away. The corpse crawling with scavengers haunted his sleep for a long time. 28.

Draw your own moral from this, Sparky. And remember at the center of the cult of personality called stardom there is just a big empty hole. Awards don't matter. Acclaim doesn't matter. Only your craft matters.