Quotes from John Scalzi

In the lobby, the receptionist had attached herself to Hester, sobbing in joy. Hester stood there, wearing a receptionist, deeply confused.

Remind me again why I hired you." "I honestly don't know, Lady Nadashe. But inasmuch as you've already paid me, in advance, for roughly the next forty years—thank you for that, by the way, my wife loves the new dining room set probably more than she loves me—you might as well keep me.

He said he wants your wisdom about certain members of the executive committee. He's apparently finding a few of them difficult to reach a rapport with." "It's because he's an asshole." "That would have been my guess, too.

And indeed her minister seemed gratified that she went exactly where he needed her to go. They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.

Any parent who would force a two-year-old to stare at a computer when the kid would rather do something else deserves the rough side of a moving chainsaw blade.

It's not like the countess doesn't already know we're fucking." Fundapellonan blinked at this. "What?" "I assumed she told you I like to fuck around, so you should get with me to see if I would say anything useful while we banged." "Is that what you really think is going on here?" Fundapellonan asked. "Isn't it?" "Well, yes," Fundapellonan admitted. "But you're not supposed to think it.

The solution was stupidly simple, which is why no one bothered with it.

I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending—if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

And when we designed the church, we intentionally made the divine aspect of it as ambiguous as possible. People don't mind having the mystical aspect of a church being poorly defined as long as you make the rules of the church clear. We

I think that a lot of the drive to have overachieving children is defensive—the idea of making sure your child is fully armed against all the other kids, whose parents are busy packing their little brains with facts so they can claw their way into the Ivy League over the broken bodies of their classmates. While

Try not to vote for anyone who is a whirling amoral vortex of chaos.

She had this recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie that would knock you on your ass.

the sick horror of unwillingly picturing his child's death, the hollow, horrible ache standing in that place in his life where his daughter had been, and mad, acidic desire to do something more than mourn.

There is a certain type of person who feels like they must be armed at every moment of the day or else the world will come for them in some way.

In my opinion, the goal of parenthood is to teach your kid how to explore the world and find himself or herself in it; this naturally requires that the focus is on the kid, and not the parent. The parent who is leaping in and mud-wrestling a teacher over a "B" or bribing the local daycare center staff to get their kid in is probably not focused on what the kid needs so much as what the parent thinks he needs to prove.

No, no, I'm just fucking with you. They all lived happily ever after. Seriously.

You believe someone is leveraging all this to work against me." "You are the emperox, ma'am. Someone is always working against you. It's in the job description.

This is the first time I've unzipped my pants as emperox. First time sitting on the toilet as emperox. Aaaaaaand now this is my first pee as emperox.

I'm more interested in becoming a commercial writer, and unfortunately, commentary on my writing from a bunch of other unpublished writers is of little utility in that regard. Being a better writer is something of a moot point, since if you're not a commercial writer to some extent, very few people will know whether your writing is any good or not.

Despite the fact that he fully intended to be one of them, Marce managed to feel resentment toward them, toward the people who could, in fact, leave their problems behind through the simple application of money.

There was no need to import my crippling diet cola addiction to a brand-new world, and besides, the fountain was Pepsi products anyway.

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Seems like an irrelevant detail," Schmidt said. "And you call yourself a scientist," Wilson said. "No, I don't," Schmidt said. "Good thing, then," Wilson said.

If we're going to be fucked, Colonel, I prefer to get fucked on my feet instead of on my knees." "You have a way with mental imagery, General