125 Quotes by Connie Willis

That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

What's Management up to?" I whispered to Bennett."My guess is a new acronym," he whispered. "Departmental Unification Management Business." He wrote down the ltters on his legal pad. "D.U.M.B.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do," she murmured back. "So they've invented a new acronym.

Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

To do something for someone or something you loved- England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history- wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.