John Varley

“You see…when you get right down to it, I don’t believe you have my daughter. I won’t until I see her. And having seen her, I won’t believe I could lose her again.”

Sherman looked at him for a long time.

“The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.”

I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.

I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things—a completion that can never be achieved.

Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.

You can define heroism any way you want to, but that’s it for me. It’s sticking in there no matter what. Whether it’s a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down…

It’s fulfilling your responsibilities.

Me, I don’t know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do you know is that I’ve had ample reason to embrace the philosophy.

“Don’t be such a pessimist.”

“All time travelers are pessimists.”

If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself.

You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they’re new. Otherwise you rust.

Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.

News is, by definition, bad news.

The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.

But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that.