Quotes from Paul J. McAuley

Societies as well as people become afraid of change as they grow older. It's human nature. The young have adventures while the old sit at home and nurture their memories.

Everything's a data point.

A poster by the door to the locker room showed a Jackaroo avatar dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing a white-gloved finger under the caption I Want You for Anal Probing .

I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away.

Everyone should find something they love doing. Then work isn't work. It's a part of themselves. Of who they are.

The past doesn't change, does it?" "It's still there, same as it ever was. But we see it differently as we get older.

One thing that's certain about the future: it will have more history than the present.

This is an age of superstition and wishful thinking. The sky is full of evening's empires, and every one of them is founded on sand.

But you need to cultivate patience, youngling. And you need to listen to my words of wisdom, because as far as you are concerned, I am Obi-Wan fucking Kenobi. Okay?

When people go looking for something, they often find something else.

What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?

The multiverse, she said, was like an old library whose shelves were packed with books arranged by a cataloguing system that ranked them according to similarity, each book containing within its covers a story that varied only slightly from the stories of its immediate neighbours, but by increasing degrees from those of increasingly distant books.

We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future.

Your so-called "self" is a composite superimposed on the activity of many competing subpersonalities or agents. What you perceive as your consciousness is a string of temporary heroes rising above those they have defeated. And so you seek out heroes in the common story of your race.

One day something will come through that will amaze us all.