Tim Powers Quotes & Sayings

I've learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you've got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire. — Tim Powers

Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight. — Tim Powers

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. - William Faulkner — Tim Powers

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink. — Tim Powers

I think this is the first of her last-person novels." Scott — Tim Powers

What's a pandemonium?" whispered one of the men in the rear.
"It's like a calliope," answered a companion. "I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister's boy play his organ."
"His what?"
"His organ."
"Lord. People pay money to see things like that? — Tim Powers

The wages of courage is death, lad, but it's the wages of everything else, too. — Tim Powers

It's a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we're the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it's a district of England or France or Spain. — Tim Powers

Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense*
not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober). — Tim Powers

It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail. — Tim Powers

A kid just couldn't see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats. — Tim Powers

As soon as I get a ship that can take to the open seas, I'm going to find and rescue and - if there's any worth in me - marry the only woman in whom I can see both a body and a face, and with whom I need not resign one or the other of my own. — Tim Powers

Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again.
'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies,
'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.'
Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done. — Tim Powers

Somebody's killing the moon, the goddess; some woman has apparently taken on the - what would the word be - goddess-hood and somebody's killing her. I think it's too late for her, and I don't know the circumstances, but she's got a child, a little girl. An infant, in fact, to judge by how close Venus was to the moon when we saw it." Here — Tim Powers

The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. — Tim Powers

The Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys while the cat by the fire is curled. Then away they floats in their eggshell boats, down the drains to their underground world. — Tim Powers

I'd be happy just to go back to about 1990," said Scott quietly. "The way we all were then. — Tim Powers

Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives it away. — Tim Powers

Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans' error. — Tim Powers

Under," he said in a shaky voice, "normal circumstances, I'd certainly be in love with you." "Nobody falls in love under normal circumstances," she said softly, rubbing his finger with her warm thumb. He restrained an impulse to look to see if there was still ink on it. "Love isn't in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway. — Tim Powers

Time," he said solemnly, "is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curled around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant. — Tim Powers

Byron; and, realistically, quite a number of those infants will die without my care, and Josephine is hardly a creature with potential, hardly anybody's idea of a tabula rasa, a blank slate - hell, she's a slate that's had bad math scrawled on it and then been waxed so that nothing can ever be written on it again. I've treated sheep that had more of a right to live. — Tim Powers

Let us quickly be finished with this business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner. — Tim Powers

Another howl broke from the tent downstream, this one sounding more like pieces of metal being violined against each other than an issue from any organic throat. — Tim Powers

His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building. — Tim Powers

We need a pretty substantial favor." She pointed at Crawford and herself. "He and I want to get married. Uh, Father Cyprian, this is John Crawford, and this is our daughter, Johanna." The priest nodded sympathetically. "One does tend to keep putting these things off, doesn't one? — Tim Powers

Summer lightning made it seem that flickering white-hot wires were turning in the terribly blue sky just above the horizon, and the recent storms had driven in toward shore hundreds of gigantic Portuguese man-o'-wars that now hung below the surface of the water like big malignant pearls. — Tim Powers

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for. — Tim Powers

Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he'd dropped something. "It's
do keep calm now
it's right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly."
Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.
And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn't just die in this instant. — Tim Powers

I think a lot of people in the Conservative party came from other parties. There wouldn't be a Conservative party today if people hadn't come from other parties. — Tim Powers

Jacky, who had read and admired Mary Wollstonecraft, and despised the fashion of fluttery helplessness in women, felt, to her own annoyance, close to fainting. — Tim Powers

When they'd gone the old man turned around to watch the sun's slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn't even be able to encompass, it's a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle.
Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill ... But be willing to die for your choice. — Tim Powers

The long gray two-story box was the newest structure on the property, having been built in the 1970s. The buildings up the hill had accumulated one by one since the 1920s, most of them incorporating bits salvaged from various torn-down hotels and movie sets. Their aunt Amity, affluent from the sales of her series of popular novels, had added to the architectural clutter after — Tim Powers