Quotes from Joan D. Vinge

Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

There are two tragedies in life. One is never getting your heart's desire. The other is getting it.

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.

It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you...just let me love you now.

Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that... that gentleness isn't... weakness.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

Everything changes, today's tears are tomorrow's absurdities, after all.

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

I am only a cup that knowledge holds. It does not to knowledge matter how poor the cup is. It is the wisdom of those who drink of me that me wise makes. Fools make a sibyl foolish, wherever she is.

I stood where they'd left me. I watched them get smaller and smaller as they went down the hallway, leaving me there without a word, not even looking back. Only I was getting smaller and smaller, being swallowed up in the suffocating emptiness of the silent house; so that by the time they came back again, I would have disappeared.

Most people simply aren't unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown

All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become doctors? Except for the sadists, of course, who simply enjoy the blood and the pain.

Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don't we? We have to go on looking for justice... and settling for revenge.

Yes, she made me love her. But she didn't mean to. She took by giving... and that makes all the difference.

My gods or your gods, who know which are stronger?' That's why we honor them all - just in case. There are more cultures even than Gods in the Eight Worlds, and among them you'll find people who are willing to kill you, or each other, over any difference in belief or lifestyle or physical appearance you can imagine - and some you can't. They all think they're right. There's no Truth, Tammis, only differences of opinion.

How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days!

S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

I love you,' he whispered again, wonderingly, as he understood at last how a lifetime together with someone that you loved could seem like an eternity, and yet not be long enough.

You've made her so beautiful; when she's come to take your life away.

Things change all the time; but how much of it is real? Does any choice any of us ever makes, no matter how important it seems, really cause a ripple in the greater scheme of things?

There were some things even the rules of an absolute human overlord had no right to deny, and one of them was justice

He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go.