Quotes from Connie Willis

Eureka!s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

face Lady Schrapnell. And I promised I'd help

Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Wicked. Rent. The Music Man. Almost any musical will do. Except Cats." "Why? Doesn't it shut out the voices?" "No, it shuts them out fine. But it's a terrible musical.

Mentally competent people believe all kinds of goofy things

Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—

Great things.

He stepped forward and grasped the staircase's railing, looked up at her earnestly. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? 'He doesn't mean the war,' she thought. 'He's talking about all of it - our lives and history and Shakespear. And the continuum. She smiled down at him. A comedy, my lord.

Oh, it'll definitely fool the Germans, Cess said. There's no clearer proof that there's an army in the area than beer bottles and used condoms.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." —ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY, The Little Prince If

Can anybody join this FLIP?" the waitress said. "I'm already in a latte recovery group, but there aren't any cute guys in it.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart." —DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

The multinationals who'd been backing Darby and Gentilla lost interest, and time travel had been handed over to historians and scientists

For the past two days I've been on the river with an Oxford don who quotes Herodotus, a lovesick young man who quotes Tennyson, a bulldog, and a cat," I said. "I played it by ear.

Con man?" he said, stuffing the brochures back in the duffel bag and zipping it up. "Absolutely not. That's a legitimate policy. I've sold hundreds of them, and not a single policy holder has ever been abducted by an alien.

Fourteen percent of NDEers reported having frightening experiences, devils and monsters and suffocating darkness.

The original regulations had required it in every case of "unidentified disease or suspicion of contagion," but those had been passed in the first hysteria after the Pandemic

She nodded. "The Michigan State Library fire was caused by a student trying to burn the state draft board files so he wouldn't be drafted and ended up destroying twenty thousand volumes.

I had gone off with a contemp and a complete stranger—to say nothing of the dog—and left my contact waiting on the station platform or the tracks or in a boathouse somewhere.

Well, at least she's asserting herself, and you don't have to worry about her having 'squelched girl syndrome,' " she said. Mary Clare ignored that.

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 was a myxovirus. It killed twenty million people. Viruses mutate every few months. The antigens on their surface change so that they're unrecognizable to the immune system. That's why seasonals are necessary.

Yeah, like this one carny up in Fargo. It had a big sign saying 'See the Siamese twins,' and everybody pays a buck, thinking they're gonna see two people hooked together. And when they get there it's a cage with two Siamese kittens in it. Like that.

Do you know the only way you can tell for sure the deer are there? Mel shook his head. By the wolves, he said.

This gave me an early taste for humorous authors, of which there were—and are—far too few (though there are lots who labor under the misapprehension that they're funny.)

a powder for the headache which Mrs. Mering had given all of us, but which she took herself.