John Scalzi citations

“The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time.
You can’t stop aging. Gene therapies and replacement organs and plastic surgery give it a good fight. But it catches up with you anyway. Get a new lung, and your heart blows a valve. Get a new heart, and your liver swells up to the size of an inflatable kiddie pool. Change out your liver, a stroke gives you a whack. That’s aging’s trump card; they still can’t replace brains.”

“If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.”

“I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have inside your head.”

“In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).”

“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”

“I’m not insane, sir,” I said. “I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”

“I failed angst in high school. They let me graduate anyway.”

“There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.”

“You would rather face a life without me than to have me choose a life I would not choose for myself.”

“I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two.”

“Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals.”

“We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole.”

“I didn't mind getting old when I was young. It's the being old now that's getting to me.”

“I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.”

“The story of how I left Huckleberry begins -- as do all worthy stories -- with a goat”

“In other words, crew deaths are a feature, not a bug," Cassaway said, dryly.”

“If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.”

“What is it like when you lose someone you love?" Jane asked.
"You die, too. And you wait around for your body to catch up.”

“Who are you and what medications aren’t you taking?”

“You are sufficiently like me to officially be interesting.”

“He’s almost certainly planned for the contingency of being caught. He’s rich and he’s got more lawyers than some countries have people.”

““Harry!” Boutin said. “Nice guy. Didn’t know he was that smart. He hid it well.””

“When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed.”

““Every creature has fear,” Jared said. “Even the non-conscious ones.”
“No,” Boutin said. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it’s not the same thing. Fear isn’t the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential.”

“That’s physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry.”

“You don’t win by getting through all your life not having done anything.”

““You and I don’t actually need to be here for this,” I said to the goat. The goat didn’t respond, but I could tell she agreed with me.”

““I don’t know,” Davidson said. “Maybe it’s not about politics. Maybe these guys are just assholes.”
“Seems the simplest explanation,” I said.”

“The failure mode of clever is “asshole.””