Quotes from Connie Willis

Do you want to see his picture?" She pulled out her phone and began busily swiping, and at the next stoplight, held it over for Briddey to see. "His name's Xander.

And I wouldn't feel any loss because I wouldn't ever have met her. I wondered suddenly if Terence did, if he knew on some level that he hadn't met his true love. And if he did, what did he feel? Mawkish sorrow, like one of his Victorian poems? Or a gnawing of some need unsatisfied? Or just a grayness to everything?

Madame Iritosky opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again, looking exactly like Colonel Mering's globe-eyed ryunkin. "Fish?" Baine said, bending over her with the platter of sole. Round One to our side. Now, if only the seance would go as well.

I looked at my pocket watch. It was half past IX.

her. I never felt properly sorry for schizophrenics, she thought, unable to escape the voices in their heads and fighting for their sanity with a maelstrom of noise all around them, making it impossible to think. No

Which room is breakfast in?" I asked Baine. "The breakfast room, sir," he said.

When I was nineteen—which was, oh, Lord, forty years ago, it doesn't seem that long—my sister and I traveled all over Egypt," she said. "It was during the Pandemic. Quarantines were being slapped on all about us, and the Israelis were shooting Americans on sight, but we didn't care. I don't think it even occurred to us that we might be in danger, that we might catch it or be mistaken for Americans. We wanted to see the Pyramids.

Three o'clock's when every doubt and regret and guilty thought bubbles up out of your subconscious to plague you. 'The dark night of the soul,' F. Scott Fitzgerald called it.

They're saying it's some sort of biological weapon," Colin said. "They're saying it escaped from a laboratory.

It didn't sound like a nightingale," Terence said. "Nightingales sing of summer 'in full-throated ease and pour their souls abroad in ecstasy.' This didn't sound like that. Listen.

I assumed that Dawson was his valet. Then again, it might be his pet raccoon.

I promise you calm seas,' Ã¢â'¬Â Sir Godfrey called, and raised his hands in benediction, " Ã¢â'¬Ëœauspicious gales, and sail so expeditious that shall catch your royal fleet far off.' 

Perhaps that's what's wrong with our time, Mr. Dunworthy, it was founded by Maisry and the bishop's envoy and Sir Bloet. And all the people who stayed and tried to help, like Roche, caught the plague and died.

He rang off, pocketed the disk

You can't go back," Gilchrist said. "Haven't you heard? We're under quarantine, thanks to Mr. Dunworthy's carelessness.

There was a curse. It lay on all of us, though we didn't know it. Anyway Lacau didn't. Standing there, reading the tomb seal out loud to me in my cage, he didn't have a clue who the warning was meant for. And the Sandalman, standing on the black ridge watching the bodies burn, had no idea he had already fallen victim to it.

He was almost too tired to do that, though he knew he would regret it if he went to bed in his clothes. That was the province of the young and nonarthritic. Colin would wake refreshed in spite of digging buttons and constricting sleeves. Kivrin could wrap up in her too-thin white cloak and rest her head on a tree stump none the worse for wear, but if he so much as omitted a pillow or left his shirt on, he would wake stiff and cramped.

No," said Harris, "if you want rest and change, you can't beat a sea trip." Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome

He sounded time-lagged, but probably wasn't. All of Lady Schrapnell's new recruits sound time-lagged.

Are you making something up in your head, miss?" —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener

It was physically impossible for the verger to be suffering from time-lag, unless it was somehow contagious.

Should I ration the lavatory paper, do you think, sir,' Finch said, 'or put up notices asking everyone to conserve?

Grandmother. Agnes had not said anything like "grandmother." The word hadn't even existed until the eighteenth century

The past and the future are both part of a single continuum