Quotes from Terry Bisson

I thought you just told me they used radio." They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.

This woman was truly what he wanted, and therefore he was truly afraid for the first time.

Through the door came a being of intense vivacity, impeccable sartorial integrity, and intermittent intelligibility.

Identity lies not in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells.

The present, due to its staggering complexities, is almost as conjectural as the past." —George Jackson "Dawn also has its terrors." —Victor Hugo "America is our country, more than it is the whites' ... we have enriched it with our blood and tears." —David Walker "My love to all who love their neighbors." —John Brown

He raised his sunglasses and saw a young woman in an impossibly brief dress with an improbably welcoming smile

Fire on the mountain," the granny woman said. "They up there sharpening they swords." Then she said that word again: freedom.

Yasmin loved the little woman with her seamed glowing face, tiny mahogany hands ghosted with flour, white hair like a veil, tied up; loved her in that way women never get to love their own mothers because there is not enough unsaid, and too much said, between them.

I was very aware that the army was here to kill something hiding out (and I think the other black folks felt this as well) not only on the mountain, but inside my heart as well.

Sometimes missing things was the next best thing to having them.

Oh, Brown was our lion and Tubman our fox, great-grandson!

How close the past looms, circling the present like a dead moon, lifting slow repetitious tides on the living planet.

Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone

Never tell the whole truth in a trade. A favor is an investment.

Antlers clicked together and knocked against the glass. A stream of caribou was splitting around the Chrysler like brown water around a red and white rock, running in a heavy million-hearted whisper north across the forest floor.

Darlene died doing what she loved, which was trying to stay alive.

Everybody has one thing they keep, one thing that matters to them more than anything else. Life is just a process of elimination, figuring out what that one thing is. You may figure it out right at the end, just as you're losing it. If you're lucky.

Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?

Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?