Best 58 quotes of Connie Willis on MyQuotes

Connie Willis

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    Connie Willis

    Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

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    Connie Willis

    A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

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    Connie Willis

    And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

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    Connie Willis

    Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

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    Connie Willis

    Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

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    Connie Willis

    Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

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    Connie Willis

    Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it's possible to be an artist and a good person.

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    Connie Willis

    He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?

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    Connie Willis

    I am a Colorado native, and, no, I did not vote for the anti-gay amendment or the same-sex marriage ban, and I am not a member of a militia.

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    Connie Willis

    If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.

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    Connie Willis

    I hate sequels. They're never as good as the first book.

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    Connie Willis

    I have great faith in the future of books - no matter what form they may take - and of science fiction.

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    Connie Willis

    It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.

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    Connie Willis

    It is not an easy thing to put on a wet sock.

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    Connie Willis

    It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances.

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    Connie Willis

    I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.

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    Connie Willis

    I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

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    Connie Willis

    I watched the entire O.J. Simpson trial, and he was guilty.

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    Connie Willis

    Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

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    Connie Willis

    No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

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    Connie Willis

    One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.

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    Connie Willis

    One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.

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    Connie Willis

    People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.

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    Connie Willis

    Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.

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    Connie Willis

    Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

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    Connie Willis

    Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie. "You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him. "Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.

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    Connie Willis

    That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

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    Connie Willis

    The entire range of human experience is present in a church choir, including, but not restricted to jealousy, revenge, horror, pride, incompetence (the tenors have never been on the right note in the entire history of church choirs, and the basses have never been on the right page), wrath, lust and existential despair.

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    Connie Willis

    There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I'd like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O'Reilly's macaques, which have to have more sense.

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    Connie Willis

    There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.

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    Connie Willis

    The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

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    Connie Willis

    To do something for someone or something you loved-England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history-wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.

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    Connie Willis

    When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

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    Connie Willis

    Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

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    Connie Willis

    You'd help if you could, wouldn't you, boy?" I said. "It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by-

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    Connie Willis

    You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

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    Connie Willis

    And I wouldn't feel any loss because I wouldn't ever have met her. I wondered suddenly if Terence did, if he knew on some level that he hadn't met his true love. And if he did, what did he feel? Mawkish sorrow, like one of his Victorian poems? Or a gnawing of some need unsatisfied? Or just a grayness to everything?

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    Connie Willis

    But if she'd come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She'd have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she'd have no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens. She'd have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what it had cost to bring this day to pass--the lives of all those soldiers and sailors and airmen and civilians.

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    Connie Willis

    Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.

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    Connie Willis

    Eureka!"s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

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    Connie Willis

    Good. Drink your tea," he ordered. "It will make you feel better." Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month's sugar ration into it. She drained the cup, feeling ashamed of herself. She wasn't the only one who'd had a bad night.

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    Connie Willis

    Io suuicien lui damo amo," she said softly. "You are here in place of the friends I love.

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    Connie Willis

    It is the end of the world. Surely you could be allowed a few carnal thoughts.

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    Connie Willis

    ...It was only ninety-four pages long, and so obviously wretchedly written it was destined to become a huge fad

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    Connie Willis

    Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do," she murmured back. "So they've invented a new acronym.

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    Connie Willis

    Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

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    Connie Willis

    Moom' and 'tomb' actually rhyme, which is something Dickinson hardly ever did, preferring near-rhymes such as 'mat/gate', 'tune/sun,' and 'balm/hermaphrodite.

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    Connie Willis

    Movie Cliche #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious and everybody gets the point.

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    Connie Willis

    Oh, it'll definitely fool the Germans," Cess said. "There's no clearer proof that there's an army in the area than beer bottles and used condoms.

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    Connie Willis

    Seriousness of mind was a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian physics. I am not convinced it is not a handicap in understanding quantum theory.