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Connie Willis Quotes

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis , commonly known as Connie Willis, is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer—most recently the "Best Novel" Hugo and Nebula Awards for Blackout/All Clear . She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.Several of her works feature time travel by history students at a faculty of the future University of Oxford—sometimes called the Time Travel series. They are the short story "Fire Watch" , the novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog , as well as the two-part novel Blackout/All Clear . All four won the annual Hugo Award but Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.



Wikipedia  

✵ 31. December 1945   •   Other names کانی ویلیس, 康妮·威利斯
Connie Willis photo

Works

To Say Nothing of the Dog
Doomsday Book
Connie Willis
Bellwether
Bellwether
Connie Willis
Lincoln's Dreams
Lincoln's Dreams
Connie Willis
Passage
Passage
Connie Willis
Connie Willis: 39   quotes 0   likes

Famous Connie Willis Quotes

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

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

“I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book

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

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

“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.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

“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?”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 3 “Tributaries”, Section 3 (p. 119)

Connie Willis Quotes about people

“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.”

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.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

“That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”

Connie Willis Passage

Source: Passage

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

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 20 (p. 326)

“Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 2 “Bubblings”, Section 3 (p. 63)

“It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 18 (p. 318)

Connie Willis Quotes about time

“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 3 “Tributaries”, Section 4 (p. 127)

“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.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 4 “Rapids”, Section 1 (p. 140)

“The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 26 (p. 436)

“I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?”

Connie Willis

Source: Fire Watch (1982), pp. 129-130 in The Nebula Awards 18 edited by Robert Silverberg

“If they were part of the self-correction (i. e., of the space-time continuum) what did that do to the notion of free will? Or was free will part of the plan as well?”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 28 (p. 479)

Connie Willis Quotes

“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.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Dogs , Past

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

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.”

Connie Willis

Source: Even the Queen: & Other Short Stories

Freedom

““The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”
“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”
Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 31 (p. 496)

God , Hope

““How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”
“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.
“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”
“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”
“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”
“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”
“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.
“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”
“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.””

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 22 (p. 374)

Truth , World , Beauty , Art

“Baine, what do you think of this?” Tossie said, indicating the bishop’s bird stump. “Don’t you agree it’s the most beautiful piece of art you’ve ever seen?”
Baine straightened and looked at it, blinking water out of his eyes.
There was a considerable pause while Baine wrung out his sleeve. “No.”
“No?” Tossie said, making it into a screamlet.
“No.”…
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean the sculpture is a hideous atrocity, vulgarly conceived, badly designed, and shoddily executed,” he said, folding the shawl carefully and bending to lay it back in the bundle.
“How dare you say that,” Tossie said, her cheeks very pink.
Baine straightened. “I beg you pardon, miss. I thought you were asking my opinion.”
“I was, but I expected you to tell me you thought it was beautiful.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

He bowed slightly. “As you wish, miss.” He looked at it, his face impassive. “It is very beautiful.”
Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 19 (p. 333; the ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Beauty , Art , Bird , Thinking

“Nobody deserves this. “Please,” she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked.
Whatever it was, it was not granted.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 31 (p. 498)

“Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 4 “Rapids”, Section 2 (p. 151)

Hate , Animals

“Servants don’t travel with their employers.”
“How do they do without them?”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

”They don’t.”

Chapter 18 (pp. 317-318)
To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998)

Travel

““What’s going on?” I whispered to Gina.
“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.””

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 1 “Beginning”, Section 4 (p. 33)

““They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of service.
“It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.””

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 14 (p. 219)

“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.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 2 “Bubblings”, Section 5 (p. 75)

Sense

“It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 20 (p. 320)

Light

“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.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 5 “Main Channel”, Section 2 (p. 226)

People , Secret , Thinking , Science

“It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 31 (p. 506)

God

“That makes no sense,” I said.
“This is the Victorian era,” she said. “Women didn’t have to make sense.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 17 (p. 297)

Women , Sense

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

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 3 “Tributaries”, Section 3 (p. 117)

Faith

“Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast bifallen us.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 35 (p. 563)

“They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Colin whispered behind his order of service.
“It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”
Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 14 (p. 219)

“One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.”

Connie Willis book Lincoln's Dreams

Source: Lincoln's Dreams (1987), Chapter 4 (pp. 57-58)

People , Dreams

“A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key.”

Connie Willis

Source: Short fiction, Fire Watch (1985), The Sidon in the Mirror (p. 161)

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