“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

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Connie Willis 39

American science fiction writer 1945

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