Connie Willis

“Why is it,” Joss said, “that whenever I find you, you are always about to hop in bed with my employer?”

Nobody deserves this. “Please,” she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked.

Whatever it was, it was not granted.

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.

“The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”

“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”

Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.

"Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast bifallen us."

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

A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key.

He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket.

“Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence.”

One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.

“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”

“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”