Quotes from Tim Powers

No. It will eventually manifest itself again, but it won't be the same personality as before; though at the same time it won't be a different personality either. 'Same' and 'different' are far too specific. And it won't have learned what I want to know. It will simply happen to know it this time. Or, if not this time, it will know it some time. It's like waiting for two or twelve to come up in a game of dice.

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.

The Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys while the cat by the fire is curled. Then away they floats in their eggshell boats, down the drains to their underground world.

Time," he said solemnly, "is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curled around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant.

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

Let us quickly be finished with this business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.

Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight.

Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense* -- not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober).

Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives it away.

And unmoored souls may drift on stranger tides Than those men know of, and be overthrown By winds that would not even stir a hair…

Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." —William Faulkner

His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building.

Newton must have been right when he'd said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him.

Under," he said in a shaky voice, "normal circumstances, I'd certainly be in love with you." "Nobody falls in love under normal circumstances," she said softly, rubbing his finger with her warm thumb. He restrained an impulse to look to see if there was still ink on it. "Love isn't in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway.

Summer lightning made it seem that flickering white-hot wires were turning in the terribly blue sky just above the horizon, and the recent storms had driven in toward shore hundreds of gigantic Portuguese man-o'-wars that now hung below the surface of the water like big malignant pearls.

As soon as I get a ship that can take to the open seas, I'm going to find and rescue and - if there's any worth in me - marry the only woman in whom I can see both a body and a face, and with whom I need not resign one or the other of my own.

A kid just couldn't see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.

Jacky, who had read and admired Mary Wollstonecraft, and despised the fashion of fluttery helplessness in women, felt, to her own annoyance, close to fainting.

It was beer, not fire, that Prometeus stole from the gods and brought to man.

What's a pandemonium?" whispered one of the men in the rear. "It's like a calliope," answered a companion. "I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister's boy play his organ." "His what?" "His organ." "Lord. People pay money to see things like that?

But to be God—which of course meant to have been God all along—he had to justify every event in his past, define every action in terms that made it consistent with godhood…there could no longer be any incidents that were too uncomfortable to remember.

You know, my Friends, how long since in my House For a new Marriage I did make Carouse: Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed, And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse. —The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, EDWARD J. FITZGERALD translation