Quotes from Jack McDevitt

Celebrate whenever and whatever you can. Wed, bring forth a child, repair a broken door, cut the grass, and do not waste the opportunity to beat the drum with friends and throw a party. It is the essence of life and joy. —CHEN LO COBB, "CAREFUL WHERE YOU WALK," FROM COLLECTIBLES, 614

Scramblers could, of course, be manufactured to resemble comm links or compacts or virtually any other kind of metal object. But my philosophy is that if someone has a weapon pointed at him, he should know about it.

The home world exercises its siren call over us all. No matter how far we wander, or how long we are gone, it waits patiently. And when we return to it, as we must, it sings to us. We came out of its forests, waded ashore from its seas. It is in our blood, for good or ill.

Religion is like having children, or taking medicine, or eating, or any of a thousand other perfectly rational human activities: Taken in small doses, it has much to recommend it. One need only avoid going overboard.

He told me once about the secret of life. You know what it is?" "I'm not sure what George thinks it is." "It's having lunch with friends.

The vast majority of us are far more capable than we realize. We grow up with parents, teachers, bosses all telling us what we can't do. Don't touch it; you'll break it. They mean well, but they leave us with a sense of our own incapacity. When the day comes, if it comes, that you begin to believe in yourself, the world will be yours.

Truly evil persons do not recognize their own malevolence. They perceive themselves as generous, good-hearted, friendly sorts, who sometimes have to resort to unpleasant tactics for the general betterment of society. Even the historical monsters seem to have had no second thoughts about the damage they were causing. It was that way with Hitler and Oliver Moresby, just as it was with the Greer Avenue Strangler.

O time! The beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled— Time! The corrector where our judgments err, The test of truth, love, sole philosopher. —Lord Byron, Childe Harold IV, 1818

In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn. Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.

Live from Babylon and Ur, From Athens and Alexandria and Rome, The voices of a thousand generations, Press us, Urge us on-.

There were serious environmental problems left over from the Industrial Age, and the deterioration of the global climate seemed to coincide with political leaders who grew increasingly ruthless. The worst of these was Marko III, known to his American subjects as The Magnificent.

One of the CNN guys was literally yelling. "How can you say that? It's too dangerous for us? We still have people in Syria!

We are better than our culture. Load us down with prejudice, equip us with indifference, and we will nevertheless, at the critical moment, cast the nonsense aside and find our true selves.

If they ask for me, Say, she rides where comets go, And outpaces light.

Only the foolish and the uncaring make guarantees. Circumstances change, the world moves on, While wisdom, and sometimes decency, Require constant adjustments.

We don't fear death because we lose tomorrow, but because we lose yesterday, with its sweet poignancy, its memories of growing children, of friends and lovers, of all that we have known. Nobody else has really been there in the way we have. And when the lights go out for us, for you or me, the lights go out in that world, too.

It is not faith per se that creates the problem; it is conviction, the notion that one cannot be wrong, that opposing views are necessarily invalid and may even be intolerable.