Quotes from Warren Ellis

In the long run, you see, none of that matters. I've seen Heaven, Dowling. And it's not a place where you exercise any power. In the long run, we are all three-dimensional side-effects of a two-dimensional universe existing in a multidimensional stack.

Whenever I find myself somehow fooled into doing one of these talks, it's on the grounds that some confused soul thinks that I will talk about the digital world and the future. What always happens is that I rant for an unspecified length of time about obscure history and fringe beliefs. So you need to understand that you are now trapped in this room with me and I've already been paid. This is my cunning plan.

Now," he said, snapping the black blade open, "we have destroyed the teeth, crushed the face, and obliterated the fingerprints. And we have not been caught. We can therefore proceed with the first stage of carcass disposal. Fluid drainage." Amanda placed her hands together so quickly that they almost clapped. "Ooh," she said.

Science fiction is always about the time it's written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction.

Being a nun wasn't all it was cracked up to be and the sex was shit.

What Mogo did was to take ultimate action to improve his quality of life. This is at the root of murder. We kill people to make our own lives better. We kill them because they are obstacles to our desires, because they make us unhappy, because they burden us, or because they keep calling us fucking wizards. Murder increases happiness.

If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.

Mister Sun wondered if he really believed it was true that the heart is just a pump.

Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

There are no good futures. There's nothing to head towards but more garish, unsustainable carnival acts.

I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge.

We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it's way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.

Jim Rosato was recently married, to a Greek nurse. Rosato was half Irish and half Italian, and there was a pool on at the 1st as to which of the two would arrive at work wearing the other's skin as a hat within the year.

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT

Detective John Tallow, 1st Precinct. You, said Scarly. I hate you so much my dick is hard.

I was happiest when I was working for myself. Setting my own goals. Improving my own skills… Take control of your world.

Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable. Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour.

It was like washing down a bucket of peyote with a vatful of absinthe.

We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn't make magic carpets work.

an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It's a carny turn. Stop doing it.

In league with the fantastic. That's a thought to keep hold of.

The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don't. Because it's a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits." Adam

If Albert Einstein, the last century's very poster boy for the cunning man and the wild-haired magician of science, knew one thing, then it was simply that there was always more to be known. He didn't pridefully condemn dreams of physics and incomplete theories. He pointed off into the future and named the unknown things as, in fact, spooky action at a distance.