Michael Bishop

Quotes

1. Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?

   p. 75

2. 

   But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody.

   p. 113

3. 

   Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.

   p. 240

4. 

   What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.

   p. 41

5. 

   “Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?”

   “No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.”

   p. 142

6. 

   Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced.

   p. 92

7. 

   A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing.

   p. 266

8. 

   They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river.

   p. 303

9. 

   Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.

   “Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.

   p. 315

10. 

    Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.

    p. 158

11. 

    What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?

    p. 33

12. 

    The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.

    p. 93