Michael Bishop

"His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth."

"God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is."

"What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?"

"Coercion is the tool of the desperate."

"“Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?” “No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.”"

"Tiglathpileser was a human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone."

"“The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.” “The True Word on what? Everybody’s got his own true word, you know.” “On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion.” “No,” Zoe said. Not every one of them; just the ones that don’t know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.”"

"Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced."

"But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody."

"I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative."

"What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that."

"Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?"