Charlie Jane Anders Quotes & Sayings

People really don't understand the technology they're using. It's been talked about a lot. Apple products in particular are designed in such a way that's harder to get in and understand what processes are going on. — Charlie Jane Anders

You'll go off to your S&M high school, and I'm going to stay and lose my mind. I'm going to be so socially destroyed, I'm going to turn radioactive." "Well," said Laurence. "I don't know that it's possible to 'turn radioactive,' unless you're exposed to certain isotopes, and in that case you probably wouldn't survive. — Charlie Jane Anders

I have a pretty reasonably shrewd idea of where we go from here," said Dirrp. "At least, a sort of a notion. — Charlie Jane Anders

Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it. — Charlie Jane Anders

As Kevin listed these moments, she could see them with perfect clarity: all the missed cues and deflections, all the abortive moments of intimacy. All this time, she had been thinking of him as the one with commitment issues. Somewhere along the line, she had become an asshole. — Charlie Jane Anders

But the real point is, how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses? — Charlie Jane Anders

He found some dignity in the back pocket of his newly acquired pants and walked up into the main apartment, only tripping once. Or twice. — Charlie Jane Anders

On the long drive home, Laurence tuned out his parents explaining to him that life isn't an adventure, for chrissake, life is a long slog and a series of responsibilities and demands. When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn't do what he liked. — Charlie Jane Anders

Laurence dwelled on this linguistic injustice — Charlie Jane Anders

Laurence kept sneaking looks under the table at his propped-open copy of Have Space Suit - Will Travel. He was already halfway through the book. — Charlie Jane Anders

When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos. — Charlie Jane Anders

Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises. — Charlie Jane Anders

Actually, Laurence is hardly ever home; this is the first I've seen him in weeks. Which can only mean one thing: Red Dwarf marathon. — Charlie Jane Anders

You celebrated the small victories, and you dreamed of the big ones to come. — Charlie Jane Anders

This particular evening, a giant yellow moon crested over a clear warm sky, so every fixture, the owls included, was floodlit like a carnival on its last night in town, and moon-drunk roars came from every corner. A perfect night to go out and make some dirty magic. * — Charlie Jane Anders

When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn't do what he liked. The — Charlie Jane Anders

Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together? — Charlie Jane Anders

Palm Strike's main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies. — Charlie Jane Anders

That's the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can't stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. — Charlie Jane Anders

Stop giving Doctor Who answers! Tell me the truth! — Charlie Jane Anders

Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it's going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What's actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It's more about what's going to happen between the characters and what's taking place in the story. — Charlie Jane Anders

He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity. — Charlie Jane Anders

Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets. — Charlie Jane Anders

Serafina was late for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown. — Charlie Jane Anders

His life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over. — Charlie Jane Anders

There are no requirements when you're using a particular genre. It's not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work. — Charlie Jane Anders

every time you solve a problem you'd cause another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance? We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find other ways to handle us. — Charlie Jane Anders

Thirty bucks, okay? That's pretty much my entire supercomputer fund. — Charlie Jane Anders

Knowledge is justice — Charlie Jane Anders

I don't actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all." Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. "I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that's always going to depend on who you're dealing with. — Charlie Jane Anders

As far as we know, we're the only intelligent, technological civilization ever to develop, in the entire universe. There's complex life all over the place, but we're still basically unique. We have a fucking duty to preserve that. At all costs." Laurence — Charlie Jane Anders

Trust hipsters to make even the collapse of civilization unbearably twee. — Charlie Jane Anders

A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet. — Charlie Jane Anders

I showed my magic to a civilian one time, and it got ugly. — Charlie Jane Anders

I think that technology is much more mysterious to the people using it than, say, the automobile was. This isn't an original observation, but a lot of the smart devices people rely on now really do feel like magic to a lot of us. — Charlie Jane Anders

He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person. — Charlie Jane Anders

She already had enough people giving her shit for Aggrandizement, she didn't need a friend who was sworn to tear her down. — Charlie Jane Anders

(He had already figured out a great universal truth, that people never asked for documentation of anything, as long as you asked them for documentation first.) — Charlie Jane Anders

As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people. — Charlie Jane Anders

That's because our parents pick out our shoes," said Patricia. "Just wait until we're grown up. Our shoes will be insane. — Charlie Jane Anders

The trap that can be ignored is no trap. — Charlie Jane Anders

If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day. — Charlie Jane Anders

On the one hand, technology is more mysterious. On the other hand, we're more aware of its limitations. Every time I watch Star Trek, I'm highly aware of magical everything is: the holodeck, the warp drive. It's possible that with wormholes we might eventually be able to do something like that. But the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving. — Charlie Jane Anders

And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy. — Charlie Jane Anders

Believe me, there's nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers. — Charlie Jane Anders

You never learned the secret," said Roberta. "How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn't think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They're all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you've chosen to torture all of us instead. That's the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can't stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It's like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It's nothing personal. — Charlie Jane Anders

The bookstore had no musty "old books" smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well. — Charlie Jane Anders

Someone who doesn't care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life. — Charlie Jane Anders

You know... no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you're not. But if you're clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were. — Charlie Jane Anders

We don't need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It's how we justify killing each other. — Charlie Jane Anders

When it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. - Fairy Werewolf vs. Zombie Vampire — Charlie Jane Anders

Genres are like the surface of the ocean. There are waves and things moving, but you don't instantly see all the reefs and ecosystems that's happening beneath the surface. — Charlie Jane Anders

If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock. — Charlie Jane Anders

What was worse, being crazy or being evil? — Charlie Jane Anders

It's his life. One tends to privilege personal insights in such matters. — Charlie Jane Anders

There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars. — Charlie Jane Anders

You're going to, what, just walk down to Best Buy and get a time machine off the rack? — Charlie Jane Anders

Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills. — Charlie Jane Anders

All this time as a mad scientist why didn't he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life. — Charlie Jane Anders

Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier. — Charlie Jane Anders

Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other. — Charlie Jane Anders

Earlier, if you had a piece of technology, anyone could theoretically take it apart and put it back together again, and understand how it works. Some people would do that with the technology that they owned. It's not as easy to do that today. Most users wouldn't even think to do anything like that. — Charlie Jane Anders

And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we've grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. — Charlie Jane Anders

And at the last, a war between magic and science that would leave the world in ashes. At the center of all this were a man and a woman, who were still children now. — Charlie Jane Anders

You turned your guilt into resentment, because that seems easier to face. You won't move on until you turn it back into guilt, and then into forgiveness for yourself. — Charlie Jane Anders

This time, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to cure him. Because why not? It would be so easy. — Charlie Jane Anders

Listen, I can't be around people right now. It is nothing personal."
. . .
"Why not? Are you having a weird feeling like that you are coated with garbage that makes your skin crawl and you can't recognize other people as belonging to the same species?"
"No, NO. Why would you ask something like that?"
"Oh, uhh, nothing, it is just lately whenever I hear someone say they can't be around people, I start to worry that . . . It doesn't matter — Charlie Jane Anders

Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking. — Charlie Jane Anders

At last, Roberta had found an authority figure she could please without hating herself. — Charlie Jane Anders

One day the Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.
Probably not, though. — Charlie Jane Anders

I am unflappable," Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he'd thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him. — Charlie Jane Anders

Society is the choice between freedom on someone else's terms and slavery on yours. — Charlie Jane Anders

People who told you to "think fast" were always those who thought much more slowly than you did. — Charlie Jane Anders

Boredom is the mind's scar tissue. — Charlie Jane Anders

Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward. — Charlie Jane Anders