Quotes from Connie Willis

That's the problem with models—they only include the details people think are relevant

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction or an amusement or a waste of time is - dead wrong. Books are the most important the most powerful the most beautiful thing humans have ever created.

It is the end of the world. Surely you could be allowed a few carnal thoughts.

Poor thing, consigned to a life of frivolousness and wretched things for breakfast. Not allowed to go to school or do anything worthwhile, and eel pie besides.

There are a hundred ways a man can bleed to death. And he can be pulled from the rubble of bitterness, of despair, as well as the wreckage of the Phoenix. And which rescue is the more real? Nothing you could have done for me... was more important than the restoration of my hope.

Kivrin reached out for Dunworthy's hand and clasped it tightly in her own. I knew you'd come, she said, and the net opened.

Insecure, ill-dressed chaos theorist desires intelligent, insightful, incandescent trends researcher. Must be SC.

They make you settle for second best. That's what I like about the movies. There's always some minor character standing round to tell you the moral, just in case you're too dumb to figure it out for yourself. You never get what you want.

Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do, she murmured back. So they've invented a new acronym.

Explain! Perhaps you'd like to explain it to me, too. I'm not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go." And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.

To do something for someone or something you loved- England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history- wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.

I picked out F. Scott Fitzgerald's Bernice Bobs Her Hair and a couple of mysteries, which always have simple, solvable problems like How did the murderer get into the locked room? instead of hard ones like What causes trends? and What did I do to deserve Flip? and then went over to the eight hundreds.

Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.

1. Optimize potential. 2. Facilitate empowerment. 3. Implement visioning. 4. Strategize priorities. 5. Augment core structures.

Will I ever see you again? No. Do I love you? Yes, for all time.

I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. - From an interview on the podcast Starship Sofa, December 2010.

It's strange. When I couldn't find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.

There is nothing more helpful than shouted instructions, particularly incomprehensible ones. I

Virginia was working in the garden, and her husband Leonard called out for her to come inside, that Hitler was just about to speak on the radio. Virginia refused. "I am planting irises," she said, "and they will be here long after Hitler is gone." And they are. You can go see the irises at their house, still blooming.

It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick's Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.

One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober.

I remember an aunt saying sagely, The good die young. Not exactly a motivation to behave yourself.

Io suuicien lui damo amo, she said softly. You are here in place of the friends I love.