The Nova Trilogy Quotes

Know who I am? ... 'Good Bye Mister' is my name ... 'Wind and Dust' is my name ... 'Never Happened' is my name ... ~ William S. Burroughs

Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning. ~ Nova Ren Suma

Look out there. Can you feel them? Incredible to think - other human beings out there. You strain your eyes the whole day long, see nothing, hear nothing, still can't believe it somehow - but know it's true. Other warm bodies, hearts pumping blood. That ought to make us feel less lonely, or safer, it seems. Then why is it so shocking? Because - they don't belong here. The possibility of life in this place is more terrifying than the place itself. Can it be that we're really here? ~ Ted Tally

I started buying records in the '80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk. ~ Juan Campodonico

The sun woke at the dawn of the day. Nova woke up, brushing her hair quickly. She brushed her teeth, and then she hurried into the kitchen where her adoptive mother, Silvia, had waited for her. Silvia had adopted Nova when she was just a baby, left on the castle's front steps. It was from then on that Silvia raised her as her daughter. ~ Bellatuscana

Sometimes it could be the smallest thing that could topple over a whole life, and, in the end, destroy it. ~ Nova Ren Suma

Nova studied the city beneath her. It WAS a good reminder of what she was fighting for.
But Callum was wrong about one thing.
Sometimes, things did have to be destroyed before something better could be built. ~ Marissa Meyer

The world doesn't revolve around the Renegades! ~ Marissa Meyer

There was something to be said for the bodiless feeling that came after the cold. Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free. ~ Nova Ren Suma

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. ~ William S. Burroughs

For the record, while it's very charming that you keep trying to protect me, I would like to remind you that I actually know how to defend myself."
He grimaced. "I know. It's just... instinct."
"Well, stop it."
He held his hands up. "Won't happen again." He hesitated. I mean, unless I'm pretty sure you're about to die, then I'm absolutely going to rescue you, whether you like it or not. ~ Marissa Meyer

My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books. ~ Nova Ren Suma

He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass. ~ Dean Koontz

Astronomers sometimes observe that a star of medium magnitude increases suddenly in size; a star invisible to the naked eye may become very brilliant and visible without any telescope - the appearance of a Nova. ~ Frederic Joliot-Curie

It's not that I'm broken, and it isn't that I bleed. But when you pulled the stars from the heavens, it got so hard to see. ~ Heather Nova

But no, it's not the Ori I knew. It's an Ori I never knew. The Ori I made her into. ~ Nova Ren Suma

You're like my favorite song, Nova. The one that I never want to forget. That I want to play over and over again. ~ Jessica Sorensen

Nova Scotia is a box bass and a fiddle and German sourdough and scotch eggs. And the air, all heavy and bracing and wet. When you're driving, you wave to the old guy walking along the side of the road in the plaid flannel shirt and he waves back, because it's just what you do. This is an extraordinarily hospitable and musical place. You've got to haul wood in the winter and batten down hatches during hurricanes, and there are bagpipes and banjos and weathered old barns and whales offshore and abandoned fishing boats sleeping on the beach. ~ Kate Inglis

If I were in the deepest coalpit of Nova Scotia, and had the Rocky Mountains piled on top of me, I would not be discouraged, and I would come out on top! ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

I left him and went up on deck to look out at the slithering city, its glitter of street lamps fizzy under the rain. There's something wrong about a ship in dock, something pathetic, like a bird fluttering in a spill of oil. The Nova was tethered to her berth by ropes and chains, caught in a pool of greasy water. I could feel her shifting under my feet, tugging to be free. ~ Beryl Bainbridge

The words are said. We're one. You will have my name and all that I own, Nova. We are one. You saved my life. But more than that, you saved my soul. ~ Candace Sams

In reality I was a pencil drawing of a photocopy of a Polaroid of my sister- you could see the resemblance in a certain light if you were seeking it out because I told you first if you were being nice. ~ Nova Ren Suma

Typically, only about 2 percent of the American populace tunes in to PBS's 'Nova' series - the most successful science show on the tube. 'Survivor' and 'X Factor' get twice the ratings. ~ Seth Shostak

I can't help but wonder how the old Empire would have handled the crisis. I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey'lya's policy if I understood it correctly as a policy of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests."

"That's not what the Empire would have done Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors or some other mistake and a hotshot enemy pilot would have dropped a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."

Dorja Han ~ Walter Jon Williams

So I sing
I sing to get on with it
I sing to say afloat
I float to stay free
I do not commit so that I can keep dreaming
and I dream so that the possibilities remain perfect ~ Heather Nova

You let me be who I am. So many people ask me why I need to take pictures all the time. Why I'm staring at something they can't see. It's like I have to apologize for having eyes. But you've never rushed me. I'm at my best around you. You're my nova. You light me up. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

When I saw you … dying, it was … I never thought I'd feel fear like that again. But you've given me so much of yourself, all your memories - all of you. It's been like absorbing a whole other person. So when that eerie crushed the air from your lungs, it felt like my heart stopped. Like it would stop the second yours did."

The world tilted, went askew. I dared to utter, "That's a bad thing, right? ~ S.B. Nova

... I'm afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important ... it's almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they're robots and forget altogether that they're real, living people ... but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that's why I'm afraid for the world," Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.
"So am I ... but I'll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they'll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards," Alecto explained. "I'm sure that they'll be able to realize how wrong it all is ... even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it. ~ Rebecca McNutt

It was the most private thing we had left - held even closer than our bodies, because our bodies were searched, all holes and crevices and cavities in every horrible way that could be imagined. But no one could shake out the truth from inside us. They couldn't search us for that.
Our guilt and our innocence were only our own, and she should know to keep it that way. ~ Nova Ren Suma

I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction. ~ Lynn Coady

In the head-spinning cosmos of climate change, everyday hundreds of people claim there are 'thousands of papers' in support of a theory, yet no one can actually name one single paper with empirical evidence that shows carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of global warming. ~ Joanne Nova

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake's edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes -

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident -

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly. ~ Louise Gluck

I wonder who drove all the way up here to leave this piece of hate mail for the dead. ~ Nova Ren Suma

Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Nova Express begins with the blistering Last Words of the mysterious Hassan i Sabbah because time is running out: the book is not just a call-to-arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mentioned several times, but a manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony.
--Oliver Harris, Introduction William S. Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text ~ William S. Burroughs

I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix. ~ Zoe Kravitz

Nova shrugged, looking as if she had personally invented shrugging and hadn't quite sorted out the fine details yet. ~ Philip Reeve

Through a large field that had turned a dead yellow after an early frost, past the multicoloured clapboard company houses and through a flurry of fabric hanging from clotheslines… after a few minutes he stopped at the edge of a high cliff, where a long time ago he'd been able to see the mine towers and orange smog from the steel mill way off in the distance, and he'd been able to stare for hours at the periwinkle-coloured ocean waves crashing against the jagged rocks below. At times he'd wonder what it would be like to cross the ocean. He knew from the books he'd read that he would be in Europe probably, that by plane it took hours, by boat it took weeks depending on the speed of the boat… he knew the street maps of Paris and London and Pennsylvania. He knew all the monumental buildings of the world… but he was unable to leave, if he tried to leave Nova Scotia, Mearth would lock him in the basement of his house for months, maybe even years, in the dark, isolated…
Not even wanting to consider it, he closed his eyes, the swift wind from the ocean gusting through the scraggly grass. As the sun briefly came out in a haze, a kaleidoscope of reds and golds, he lit a cigarette and tried to imagine that the mill and mines were still in their rightful place. ~ Rebecca McNutt

I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn't mean they were the good ones. ~ Nova Ren Suma

Astrud Gilberto sang an old bossa nova song. "Take me to Aruanda," she sang. I closed my eyes, and the clatter of the cups and saucers sounded like the roar of a far-off sea. Aruanda - what's it like there? ~ Haruki Murakami

Super 8 film is the language of silence. ~ Rebecca McNutt