John Varley

"They were testing ways whereby people didnt have to live in Chicago. It was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea."

"She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough."

"I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them."

"I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks."

"I am vehemently anti-religion. That is, organized religion. I despise them all. I try to despise them equally, but lately Islam has shot to the top of my hate list, for obvious reasons. I don’t give a shit what they do in their own squalid little dictatorships, but they seem to want to export “Submission” to the whole world, and they are willing to kill the likes of Salman Rushdie and those Danish cartoonists for insulting Islam. They are basically living somewhere around the 8th Century, and I often wish I had a time machine to send them back there. (Yes, I know there are moderates. So why don’t they do something about the zealots?) So when I mention religion at all in my stories, the practitioners are usually doing something nutty. About as nutty as praying five times a day facing Mecca, saying a rosary, handling deadly snakes, or speaking in tongues."

"Buildings were just the worlds furniture, and he didnt care how it was arranged."

"There’s always a way to work out your problems if you’re only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done. For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you’re up and have the coffee perking, it’s too late to go back to sleep."

"They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing."

"We speak of the rigid framework of events, but the fact is there is some leeway. Apparently things tend to happen the way they should happen, according to whatever plan was dictated by whoever’s in charge of this stinking universe. Changes, if they are minor, correct themselves in ways no one understands but which tend to make a hash of anybody’s theory of free will."

"The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station. “Easy, Bill,” Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. “You don’t want to wind up on the six o’clock news. Not that way.” “I hope there’s a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil’s waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like.”"

"We were in the middle of a festival known as Christmas, which seem to take up the whole month of December. There was a big tree decorated with lights, and various other decorations hung around the buildings. Christmas was a time for spending money, traveling, and getting drunk. It had originally been a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, but by the 1980s that had been largely forgotten, replaced by a new totem in a red suit and a false beard."

"There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness."