...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patient...
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before t...
A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice...
Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better...
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be ve...
Daniel first kisses his brother in a town where no-one knows them, a no-account place that's barely even a town, just some buildings clustered around the highway: a smoky bar, an empty motel, a convenience store that only sells candy and condoms and ...
He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are te...
I feel like there are fifty ways it's my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone el...
Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas ...
Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts ...
If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-fig...
Ray Kinsella: Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within... y-you came this close. It would KILL some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they'd consider it a tragedy. Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham: Son, if I'd only go...
Trip: See the way I figure, I figure this war would be over a whole lot sooner if you boys just turned right on around and headed back on down that way, and you let us head on up there where the real fighting is. 10th Connecticut soldier: We got men ...
Myra Fleener: A man your age comes to a place like this, either he's running away from something or he has nowhere else to go. Coach Norman Dale: What I'm doing here has *nothing* to do with you. Myra Fleener: Just stay away from Jimmy. I don't want ...
Yinsen: That doesn't look like the Jericho missile. Tony Stark: That's because it is a miniaturized arc reactor. I've got a big one powering my factory at home. Yinsen: What will it generate? Tony Stark: If my math is right - and it always is - three...
Mike Wallace: "Mike"? Try "Mr. Wallace." We work in the same corporation, doesn't mean we work in the same profession. What are you gonna do now? You gonna finesse me? Lawyer me some more? I've been in this profession fifty fucking years. You and the...
Eddie: Twenty grand, open. "Hatchet" Harry: Thirty thousand. Back to you, already-Eddie. Eddie: Fifty grand. "Hatchet" Harry: Eighty grand. Eddie: One hundred grand. Player: Whoa, whoa, whoa, look fellas, I know... "Hatchet" Harry: I know you're not ...
Maman: Jamal, time has come to turn professional. Youngest Jamal: Really? Maman: But first, let me hear that song Darshan Do Ghanshyam, my favorite bhajan. Youngest Jamal: [sings] Darshan Do [stops and commands] Youngest Jamal: Fifty rupees! Maman: [...
[first lines] Documentary Couple: I was sitting with my friend Arthur Kornblum, in a restaurant, it was a Horn and Hardart cafeteria. And this beautiful girl walked in and I turned to Arthur and I said Arthur, you see that girl? I'm going to marry he...
Celine: I had worked for this old man and once he told me that he had spent his whole life thinking about his career and his work. And he was fifty-two and it suddenly struck him that he had never really given anything of himself. His life was for no...
I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pri...
