Tim Powers

Quotes

1. “When you get to where I am—”

   “I’ll never get to where you are. I’ll make better choices.”

   “Choices! You don’t get choices, you get...situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you’ve got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.’ You’re a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it’s got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don’t. You don’t have free will, sonny.”

   “Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—”

   “Bullshit. If—” The older Marrity was panting. “If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every ‘choice’ you’d make in any moral quandary.”

   Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn’t have anticipated talking to me—he must have cooked it up for his own solace.

   “Laplace’s determinist manifesto,” came another man’s languid voice from the background. “it overlooks Heisenberg’s uncertainty.”

   “Okay,” said the older Marrity furiously, “then it’s probability and statistics that dictate what we’ll do! But it’s not—”

   “It’s a sin,” said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images—hugging her, holding her hand—and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now.

   “Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!” exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. “‘Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin?’”

   p. 345

2. 

   I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—

   p. 292

3. 

   “Did he say who he was?” asked Scott.

   “I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”

   p. 288

4. 

   “She chose to reject me!”

   That wasn’t a choice, lad—that was an empty gun saying click.”

   p. 184

5. 

   “We’re going to have a séance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass.”

   “First sensible remark all night,” said Charlotte.

   p. 339

6. 

   “Doesn’t she read chicken entrails?”

   “Oh! No, astrology.”

   “Same sort of thing.”

   p. 55

7. 

   After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?”

   She smiled faintly. “Yes.”

   “I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”

   p. 264

8. 

   “I’d offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.”

   p. 207

9. 

   I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.

   p. 141

10. 

    “I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past,” she repeated. “It’s always out there, isn’t it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What’s the use of knowing what time it is, if it’s always changing? And it’s always later!”

    p. 99

11. 

    “That’s me, that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?”

    “One future, not the future. There isn’t any the future.”

    p. 313

12. 

    Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?

    p. 71