Peter David Quotes

Truth usually makes no sense. If your desire is for everything to make perfect sense, then you should take refuge in fiction. In fiction, all threads tie together in a neat bow and everything moves smoothly from one point to the next to the next. In real life, though ... nothing makes sense. Bad things happen to good people. The pious die young while the wicked live until old age. War, famine, pestilence, death all occur randomly and senselessly and leave us more often than not scratching our heads and hurling the question 'why?' into a void that provides no answers.

I'm not supposed to be here, Xy.

Maybe science is just magic with delusions of lack of grandeur.

All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence which exists of both friends and enemies. They in turn have their own friends and enemies with whom they interact. That is a given. But we, each of us, tend to put ourselves ahead of others because we believe that we are significant. We must attend to our own needs, desires, wants, and aspirations, because each of us is our own greatest priority. No one else cares for us as much as we do, no one else can exist in our skin. We think we're important. It is where our sense of self-worth comes up, where our egos reside, where "we" are. And we believe that each of our lives means something.

It seemed to me that, no matter what endeavor I was involved in, I was to be something of a sham.

In retrospect, I would have to recommend against epiphanies. They are difficult on an emotional level, and they also sometimes move you to foolish and inopportune acts, which was what happened in my case.

All part of the service.

And then he raised the welder to his face and flicked the switch.

Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.

Noblest. Bravest. What rot. There was no bravery in buying oneself out of difficulty.

When your heart's been cut out, how's it going to feel knowing that you're the one who wielded the knife?

He smelled meat burning and realized that it was him.

Good enough, never is.

At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'

I guess it really had been brave . . . because it was so bugger-all stupid, and if there was one thing I'd come to realize, ti was that bravery and bugger-all stupidity went hand in hand.

Right, wrong - those are words thrown around by those what is in power in order to sit on the backs of those what ain't.

Why (he wondered rhetorically) do people who have a position that's being attacked constantly state that they have a right to say it, as if the right itself-rather than the statement-has been challenged?

Unfortunately, the world does not always act in a manner consistent with one's plans for it.

I resisted the temptation to turn around and stick out my tongue in derision at Beliquose. After all, there was no telling when or if we should meet again, and I certainly did not need him saying, 'Ah yes, Poe, the fellow whose trespasses i could have forgiven in their entirety ... except for the tongue thing. Yes, for that, you must surely die.

Remember what we wrote? 'And just as I cannot imagine how I survived the past without you ... I cannot imagine a future without you.' Remember? Well, I'm the future without her, buddy boy, and I can tell you right now that it's not something you're going to relish.

Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.

If I have a bow and arrow, Commander, I don't shoot a padded shaft to my target's left in order to express my annoyance. I fire a steel-tipped arrow into his leg.

There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

No. It happened. But if it simplifies your life to disbelieve it, then do so.

he was literally holding his face together.

To explore strange new worlds ... and assimilate them.
To seek out new life forms ... and new civilizations ... and assimilate them.
To boldly go where no Borg has gone before ... and assimilate them.

The biggest evildoers in the world, the ones who do what's not right, are the ones who have all the power, and that's what makes it right. It's right not 'cause you say so, or I say, or even if the Lord on high says so. It's right 'cause them what's got the money and the power, they say it's right, and that makes it right even if it's dead wrong. Dead wrong.

As for jokes, I don't think it's necessarily that what I write is funny.

I woke up dead.
Not only dead...but in hell.
I had always been somewhat sketchy on what the afterlife - were there actually such a thing - would be like for a person such as I. From all accounts and all my imaginings, I figured it would be one of two things. Either I would be surrounded by great, burning masses that were endlessly immolating souls in torment... or else I would find myself trapped within my own mind as a helpless bystander, condemned to watching me live out my life over and over again and powerless to do anything to change any of it. When idle speculation prompted me to dwell on these two options, I would find myself drawn invariably to the former, since the later was just too hideous to contemplate.
...
I was almost afraid to open my eyes, because once I did, I would know one way or the other. Perhaps I could have just lain there forever. Perhaps I was supposed to. Perhaps that was my true condemnation: to simply reside in hell with my eyes closed afraid of opening them lest matters deteriorate even further than they already had. This, in turn, made me dwell on the fact that every time I had believed things couldn't get worse, they promptly had done so with almost gleeful enthusiasm .

To the brave crew and passengers of the Kobayshi Maru ... sucks to be you.

Thus it has always been: Only in death do worthless people have worth.

Running from horrors doesn't help. The only way to deal with them is to meet them head-on.

YOU SEE THEM SOMETIMES.
They're just out of the corner of your eye, when you're not expecting them, and sometimes if you close your eyes very, very tightly, and open them quickly, there will be a quick flash of them behind your eyelids before they dissipate.
They are the echoes of deja vu, they are the regrets that are fleeting, they are that which you didn't know you missed ...
They are everywhere and nowhere.

The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weakness and my lack of resolution, at my refusal to see justice through in the name of the woman who had borne me.

Why Mr. Dickens, in his biography of that particular moment, preferred to focus on the adventures of the orphan parish child, Oliver Twist, remains a matter of speculation and mystery to all subsequent scribes of those long-departed times: of a London nearly two centuries gone, back when it was a pox-infested, grimy, depressing, fog-bound, class-favoring, sprawling, noxious, odorous, and overall distasteful place in which to live and breathe and sicken and die - as opposed to modern times, wherein the pox has been largely attended to; so that's progress of a sort.

Faith is an admirable trait. It's good to have faith in another person. But when faith is used as a substitute for reality, then it becomes a crutch for refusing to deal with that reality.

The measure of a gen'leman is how he treats ladies. They can call themselves what they wants, but if what they says don't match up with how they behaves, well, what they do says far more of who they are than what they says they are does, if you gets my drift.

We're all of us dying ... from the moment we're born

There are some for whom the good of mankind is their primary concern, and others who basically put their own considerations before everyone else. I was among the latter.

Not that he wanted to say that. It would make it sound as if he wanted to blame her..
Women were very complicated creatures. He suddenly realised he was running through his head a list of everything he considered preferable to women. It was a long and most impressive imaginary document.

It was tragic enough for the average citizen to know that bloodsucking monsters known as tax collectors already existed; to be informed that there were other inhuman bloodsuckers stalking the night as well, desiring to sink their fangs elsewhere than bank accounts, might simply have been too much for people to bear.