Quotes from John Scalzi

Yes, and I have training dealing with deep, existential questions," Dahl said. "The way I'm dealing with it right now is this: 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. That's something I can work on. It's what I'm working on now.

that was less about the fundamental nature of the visions than the fact Gianni kept interrupting Chen, and she was sick of it.

Nueva regla: La gente que viaja en el tiempo puede tomarse todo el jodido tiempo del mundo.

Fighting someone who was intimately aware of your internal state of mind made it an interesting extra challenge.

A single line of code in the Xi'an habitat's maintenance programming kept the cathedral from ever suddenly going oxygen-free—but that line of code had been recently expunged in a system update. For three months, then, nothing had kept human inefficiency from suddenly asphyxiating Archbishop Korbijn and hundreds of celebrants during morning services.

That accusation is as irrelevant as it is true

Capitalism had made it to space and was doing reasonably well.

How is it so far?" asked Cloud. "How is what so far?" "This," Cloud said, and motioned around him. "Life. The universe. Everything.

They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.

patterns when there aren't any. Imagines causality when there is none. Imagines a narrative where none exists. It's in the design of the brain itself. It's primed to lie." "And primed to believe the lie.

Isn't that weird?" I said. "All the different types of sentient species in the universe, and we're all different, but we all drink coffee.

I want to mourn her, Jared said. I feel her. I can feel the love I had for her. That he had for her. I want to remember her, even if that means I have to mourn her. That's not too much to bear for her memory. It's not, is it? No, Cloud said. I guess it's not.

It's funny to me that when people fuck up, they think 'it was just business' is in any way a defense.

There was a reason why Special Forces soldiers hardly ever retired - being retired means losing integration. Losing integration means being alone.

You're a doubter of the perfectibility of the human soul." "I think to perfect a soul you have to have one to begin with.

Isn't that the way science works? You present a hypothesis to your peers, you show them all your measurements and observations and data, and you ask them to make you a liar.

Welcome to the fucking universe! The universe is a fucked-up place, my friends.

ex machina. I

If God or gods existed, and this was all they put together for eternal life, I wasn't very impressed with their user experience.

would be an unholy agglomeration of parts, a monstrous creature that would have sent its spiritual godmother Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley far around the bend.

Watson didn't know what hit him. The last thing he sent through his BrainPal channel was a wash of emotion that could best be described as disoriented puzzlement, the mild surprise of someone who knows he's seeing something he wasn't expecting but hasn't figured out what it is. Then his connection was cut off, like a data feed suddenly unexpectedly shut down.

Then Dahl remembered that until that very second, absolutely none of that was true.

What I owe those I kill is understanding. I owe them the courtesy of recognition; acknowledgement that they were something other than just another thing I had to kill on the way to other things I had to kill.

The part of Cardenia's brain in charge of gestalting slammed everything together and shoved it into her consciousness.