Connie Willis quotes

Connie Willis is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, highly acclaimed for her wit and inventive storytelling. Her works have won numerous Hugo and Nebula Awards, making her one of the most decorated authors in the genre. She explores time travel, human relationships, and social satire in much of her writing. Here are 49 of her quotes:

You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

Connie Willis

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

Connie Willis

Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

Connie Willis

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

Connie Willis

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else-cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments-as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

Connie Willis

What's going on?” I whispered to Gina. "Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do,” she murmured back. "So they've invented a new acronym.

Connie Willis

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

Connie Willis

I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.

Connie Willis

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

Connie Willis

Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.

Connie Willis

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

Connie Willis

And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.

Connie Willis

No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

Connie Willis

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.

Connie Willis

There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.

Connie Willis

It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.

Connie Willis

I am a Colorado native, and, no, I did not vote for the anti-gay amendment or the same-sex marriage ban, and I am not a member of a militia.

Connie Willis

Nobody deserves this. "Please,” she prayed, and wasn't sure what she asked. Whatever it was, it was not granted.

Connie Willis

Servants don't travel with their employers.” "How do they do without them?

Connie Willis

The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn't clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.

Connie Willis

It's the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.

Connie Willis

It doesn't matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers.

Connie Willis