Tim Powers

Quotes

1. When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face.

   p. 178

2. 

   By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong.

   p. 377

3. 

   “William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. He’ll try to have children—he doesn’t believe any of this.”

   “Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.”

   “And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped.

   p. 80

4. 

   “Hey,” Bozzaris said, “nobody’s human.” It was an old Mossad line, a mixture of “nobody’s perfect” and “I’m only human.”

   p. 58

5. 

   “She did love us. Does.”

   “She loves you the way a drowning person loves somebody they can push down and climb on top of.”

   p. 163

6. 

   Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men.

   p. 118

7. 

   Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.

   p. 345

8. 

   People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.

   p. 28

9. 

   Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.

   p. 44

10. 

    All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.

    p. 182

11. 

    He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?

    p. 496

12. 

    Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player’s...luck.

    p. 79