Here are my 42 favorite quotes. Why 42? The number 42 holds special significance for me because I’ve always been a fan of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And there, 42 is the answer a supercomputer provides to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
So, here we go!
“Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.” ― Gene Wolfe
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“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” — Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
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“You are not the darkness you endured. You are the light that refused to surrender.” — John Mark Green
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“Hope Clouds Observation.” — Franke Herbert (Dune)
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“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” — E. L. Doctorow
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“Isn’t this planet big enough for differences?” — Anne McCaffrey (The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall)
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“A book is not complete until it’s read. The reader’s mind flows through sentences as through a circuit — it illuminates them and brings them to life.” — E. L. Doctorow
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“It is not more surprising to be born twice than once.” —Voltaire [La Princesse de Babylone. In Romans et Contes. Paris; Editions Garnier Frères; 1960: 366.]
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“Success builds character; failure reveals it.” — Dave Checketts
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“A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” — Zora Neale Hurston
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“Books are keys that open many doors.” — James Rollins
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“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” — Roy Batty, Blade Runner
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“Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain.” — Hunter S. Thompson
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“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” — Earl Nightingale.
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“Nothing good ever happens when people care more about our differences than the things we share in common.” — Cepheus ‘Van Damme’ Onyango [Sense8, Sn2. Ep10.]
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“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” — Emily Dickinson.
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“We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become.” — Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
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“Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember — the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.” — Zig Ziglar
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“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” — e. e. Cummings
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“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.” — George Eliot (Middlemarch)
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“Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.” — Rick Yaney, The 5th Wave
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“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.” — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.” — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
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“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” — Bernard Baruch
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“Stayed true to the things I knew when I was younger —
And food and love was all but left to hunger —
‘Cause when I stray from my truth as I grow older —
Too much leaves an empty hollow hunger.”
— Beth Orton (lyrics from verse 1 of “Stars All Seem to Weep”)
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“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
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“We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.” — Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
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“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along. Cue the music. Cue the dancers. Cue tomorrow.” — Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera
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“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly, we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ― Philip K. Dick
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“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction — its essence — has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.” ― Isaac Asimov
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“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy.” ― William Gibson
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“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke
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“There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
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“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” ― J. G. Ballard, Fictions of every kind
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“Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don’t like the labels, they’re marketing tools, and I certainly don’t worry about them when I’m writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek.”
― Octavia E. Butler
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“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” ― Ray Bradbury
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“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
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“Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.” ― Philip K. Dick
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“Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.”
― Octavia E. Butler
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“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.” ― Ted Chiang
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“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.” ― Freeman John Dyson, Imagined Worlds