Starship Quotes & Sayings

Do you like to read?" I asked, pointing at my little shelf.
Moses eyed my books. "Yes."
His answer surprised me. Maybe it was his reputation as a gang banging delinquent. Maybe it was because of the way he looked. But he didn't seem like the type who enjoyed sitting quietly with a book.
"What's your favorite book?" I sounded suspicious and his eyes tightened.
"I like Catcher in the Rye. The Outsiders, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Dune, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings. Anything by Tom Clancy or JK Rowling."
He said JK Rowling quickly, like he didn't want to admit to being a Potter fan. But I was stunned. — Amy Harmon

Disintegrated.
Like something had gone wrong beaming her onto the Starship Enterprise.
If you've ever wondered what that feels like, it's a lot like melting but more violent — Rainbow Rowell

But the destruction of any starship was a shocking thing to witness. Resilient and ferocious as they might appear, she was keenly conscious of the fragile life-forms protected by the hulls and armaments. Those weren't just ships exploding before her eyes. They were sentient beings, each of whom had families, friends, hopes, dreams, lives, until they met with unassailable force and ceased to exist in a brilliant flash of light. — Kirsten Beyer

Of course. Life would be tough for a repo man in the starship business. * * * The — Alastair Mayer

I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. - From an interview on the podcast Starship Sofa, December 2010. — Connie Willis

Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience. — Iain Banks

That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. — Michael Cunningham

Technology would have long ago made privacy impossible, except that this had only made it more precious and desirable
and in the close confines of starship life, respect for another's privacy had become a powerful tradition. — Gene Roddenberry

[About Uluru] I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveler who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: "Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can't miss it." If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the galaxy Zog, this is where it will be. I'm not saying I expect it to happen; not saying that at all. I'm just observing that if I were looking for an ancient starship this is where I would start digging. — Bill Bryson

But there was no plan.
For the first time in her pirating life, someone had bested her.
It's not him, Andi's mind whispered. It can't be him.
And yet, the Marauder was a corpse. It was already growing cold in the cabin, Andi's breath appearing before her in the white clouds.
Do something, Andi's mind screamed. Get us out of this. You can't go back, Andi, you can never go back.
Fear spiked through her, in and around, trying to still her like the ship.
But she was the Bloody Baroness. She was the captain of the Marauder, the greatest starship in Mirabel, and she had a crew waiting on her word. — Sasha Alsberg

Starship was a whole different thing. It was pop rock. It made more money and had more hit songs than Airplane. There was no cultural or social ethic behind it. For me, it was like selling out. I was the only one selling out. The rest enjoyed doing what they were doing. — Grace Slick

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five year mission ... to boldly go where no man has gone before. — Gene Roddenberry

If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler. — David Tennant

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you. — Scott Bakula

-When I was growing up, Lieutenant Uhura was a major role model for me, a strong black woman on the bridge of a starship ...
-In a miniskirt, answering the interplanetary telephone? — Suzanne Brockmann

People are bound to get excited when they see a ten-million-ton starship trying to fly down the street. — Terry Pratchett

Light-years away, another starship was also experiencing problems, though perhaps not as severe. The I.S.S. Antares was not a new ship either. Many older ships in the imperial space fleet reaching retirement age were being refitted with more modern equipment to extend their useful lives. Thus, technologically at least, Antares was currently one of the most advanced ships of the Imperial Space Fleet. Unfortunately, she was now also one of the most troubled. This is what the Phoenix refitting program had done to the Antares. — Christina Engela

If Captain Jean-Luc Picard asked you to serve him aboard the starship Enterprise, you'd likely be happy to. You would recognise him as a great leader and a good man, and so you wouldn't have any problem following his orders. This is basically the relationship God wants with us - not slaves, not pets, not possessions, we would be co-workers and friends. — Lewis N. Roe

This way, princess," and he ushered me inside.
I plopped down into the enormous captain's chair, staring at a dashboard that looked like it belonged on the Starship Enterprise.
Kes pushed a button and the engine roared into life.
"I can't believe you're here," he grinned at me.
"Neither can I!"
His smile dimmed. "I've waited a long time for this," he said.
Then he leaned across, gripping the back of my head as he kissed me thoroughly. — Jane Harvey-Berrick

In space?" I choked out. "We're all in space," Ultragod replied, a broad smile on his face. "Humans travel on Starship Earth." "Why thank you, Super Hippie. I can't breathe in space, you know! — C.T. Phipps

You see, being bald and wearing that gray starship uniform, I would have looked like a boy. I wanted to look like a sexy female. — Persis Khambatta

Did he seem crazy?"
Captain Geechy seemed perplexed. "No. He was quite calm and businesslike, actually. Why do you ask?"
"I ask because his plan to get rich involves hijacking a starship full of dead people," she said. "That seems like the act of someone who isn't in their right mind. It concerns me that someone not in their right mind is holding me hostage. — Michael Prelee

I liken the current situation to that of the Starship Enterprise. The shields are up and the Klingons are shooting at us and every time they land a punch they are sapping our power. — Rupert Lowe

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor. — Neal Stephenson

Carlyle spread her hands. 'I speculated that it was the remains of the starship that took the Eurydiceans to the planet. This seems to have been borne out.' She smiled. 'It transmitted a defensive virus that contained Microsoft patches. — Ken MacLeod

A fragment for my friend - If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night — Anonymous

When I was a very young actor, I cruised around in a pretty cool vehicle called the Starship Enterprise. — George Takei

And your typical TV series, you've got your police station, your apartment, the hospital, the starship, or whatever it is, and you're constantly going back to those sets and shooting, which saves you a lot of money and time. You can do that faster because you become really familiar with it and you become really good at it. — Ronald D. Moore

That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular. — Kim Stanley Robinson

'Star Trek' is about acceptance, and the strength of the Starship Enterprise is that it embraces diversity in all its forms. — George Takei

Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up. Dad gets drunk, Mom gets sick, Janie shows up for church with an Oakland Raiders tattoo. It's more fun than a movie. And it works: Nobody gets a damn thing done. Sometimes — Steven Pressfield

Oh yeah, 'Starship Troopers' was one of the best experiences of my life, and I made some lifelong friends. — Jake Busey

The Starship Enterprise is not a collection of motion picture sets or a model used in visual effects. It is a very real vehicle; one designed for storytelling. — Rick Sternbach

What does God need with a starship? — William Shatner

There's no new world, my friend, no New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee - You're tied in a knot you can never undo When you realize Earth is a starship too." "Ahh, — Kim Stanley Robinson

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins. — Robert A. Heinlein

I'm a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I'm not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don't give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch. — Iain M. Banks

Starship Troopers was great. It was great fun to work on something with blue screens and big budget special effects. Denise Richards was nice to look at too, of course. — Neil Patrick Harris

Unbreakable is a little bit Starship Troopers and a little bit Esmay Suiza, with a dash of Firefly for flavor. W. C. Bauers gives us everything we want in our military science fiction, but never allows the hardware and action to overshadow Paen and everyone else caught in the crossfire. — Dayton Ward

Picard only saw the movie, which had the entire Tales of the Black Starship subplot removed for time. — Wil Wheaton

Gene Roddenberry continually reminded us that the Star Trek Enterprise was a metaphor for starship Earth. And the strength in this starship came from its diversity, coming together and working in concert as a team. That is the strength of our countries, Canada and the United States. We are nations of diversity. — George Takei

Fact was, little Carmen was so ornamental that you just never thought about her being useful. — Robert A. Heinlein

I've always wondered though," Orn mused aloud, "what does God need with a starship?"
"Are you going to make that stupid quip every time we pass a missionary ship?"
"Until they learn a new position. — Sabrina Zbasnik

I was a huge fan of the original 'Star Trek,' and I'd never even dreamed that I would someday be captain of a starship. — Scott Bakula

War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence.

Robert A. Heinlein - Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein

Within the space of a few shows you can hear the band morph between their various identities as savvy arena rockers, intense starship pilots, vaudeville nostalgists, modest American folkies, boundary-dissolving improvisers, roots-conscious spiritualists, and mind-fucking pranksters. — Richard Gehr

Ignition! blast off!!! the vessel needs a new name! something more appropriate to a starship.
apollo? gemini? enterprise. already taken.
millennium falcon. trademarked. all rights reserved.
no! wait, i have it! dragin star! thats it! dragon star! — Margaret Weis

For most of my life I've liked to pretend I live in a starship. Punching in fake codes to get into doorways that obviously are not secure. I love that idea of living on a spaceship. Because essentially we are: a gigantic thing floating in some infinite darkness that's running on principles that we don't even understand. — Reggie Watts

Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing. — Orson Scott Card

When a brother is given the right to pass into the third life as a father, then he chooses his greatest rival or his truest friend to give him passage. You. Speaker - ever since I first learned Stark and read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, I waited for you. I said many times to my father, Rooter, of all humans he is the one who will understand us. Then Rooter told me when your starship came, that it was you and the hive queen aboard that ship, and I knew then that you had come to give me passage, if only I did well."
"You did well, Human. — Orson Scott Card

But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possess that much hubris, that he dares it to fall? — Amie Kaufman

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. — Charles Stross

Marius glowered at the long cone-shaped ship with its stupid curving tailfins. His field scan swept out. It was an illusion, produced by a small module on the airlock floor. He smashed a disruptor pulse into the solido projector, and the starship image shivered, shrinking down to a beautiful, naked young girl with blonde hair that hung halfway down her back. 'Oh, Howard,' she moaned sensually, running her hands up her body, 'do that again.' Marius let out an incoherent cry, and shot the projector again. — Peter F. Hamilton

I'm a fucking starship; I'm allowed to cheat. — Iain M. Banks

I love 'Starship Troopers.' I've seen it ten times. — Joel Kinnaman

The starship Enterprise was a metaphor starship Earth, and the vision was that the strength of this starship lay in its diversity. — George Takei

If you could be any character on The Next Generation, who would you be?"
"Easy," Solomon said. "Data. For sure."
"That makes sense," Clark said.
"You?"
"I always liked Wesley Crusher."
"What?" Solomon was appalled. "Nobody likes Wesley Crusher."
"Why not?" Lisa asked.
"Because he's a total Mary Sue," Solomon said. "He's too perfect."
"But he's always saving the day," Clark argued. "Like, always."
"Exactly. He's just a talking deus ex machina. Everybody on the ship treats him like a dumb kid, then he saves them at the last minute and, every single time, they go right back to treating him like a dumb kid again. Do I need to remind you that the starship Enterprise is full of genius scientists and engineers? Why's this kid who can't get into Starfleet Academy smarter than all of them?"
"Good point," Clark said. "He's still my choice, though. — John Corey Whaley

We live on the thin skin of a planet that rotates at about a thousand miles an hour, travels sixty-six thousand miles an hour around a gigantic gas fire, in a galaxy of a billion more wild fires moving at 1.3 trillion miles an hour across a barely comprehendible Universe. Forget the mission of the Starship Enterprise; we are unwitting galactic explorers traveling into uncharted territory at terrifying speed in every second of our existence. Cataclysmic events can happen at any moment. — Larry J. Dunlap

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader. — David Gerrold

Late in the day, she found a folded piece of paper in her pocket. She recognized August's handwriting. A fragment for my friend - If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night She'd never seen his poetry before and was impossibly moved by it. "Thank you," she said when she saw him next. He nodded. — Emily St. John Mandel

Dads had favourite armchairs in which they sat like starship captains, issuing orders and receiving cups of tea and shouting at the news without fear of contradiction. — David Nicholls

Isn't antimatter what fuels the U.S.S.
Enterprise? — Dan Brown

It is one thing for the government to reveal that UFOs are intelligently guided objects of unknown origin and another to assume that this means that "they" are here. Should we ever come into more general contact with what I encountered - assuming that is even possible - they will not be offering us plans for a starship, or a trade in exotic electronics. What will be on offer, I would suggest, is a journey into a whole new understanding of reality and the part we play in it. The "alien" is as much a herald from the dark of the universe as it is a signal from the depths of our own minds. The — Whitley Strieber

Little Jang Li-Li, eight years old, misting the orchids in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. A bright day, sunlight pouring through transparisteel panels, Li-Li making puffs of water with her mister and shrieking with laughter as every little cloud she made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red and violet and green. Master, Master, I'm making rainbows! Those colors hadn't come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber blades. Just a girl making rainbows. — Sean Stewart

While by definition, starship engine rooms should have been predictable, uneventful places that operated according to the reliable mathematics of warp physics, she'd come to believe that, more often than not, they were in fact the nexi of entropy. Order battled chaos in these places with an almost dependable regularity. And engineers, she secretly suspected, functioned as avatars of both these forces, keeping them carefully balanced so that neither overwhelmed the other. Thus, warp drive worked, but the best engineers could still find a new wrinkle in the laws of physics when circumstances required it. Bhatnagar — Robert Simpson

For the starship's inhabitants, time now stands still.
For planet Earth, the clock has begun ticking ... — Steve Alten

Starship command is like comedy, Number One. Timing is everything. — David Mack

The starship thing is really political action and reaction, the natural outgrowth of Volunteers. — Paul Kantner

It's called Star Trek: Voyager. You would be playing the captain of a starship. — Kate Mulgrew

I am not a Starfleet commander, or T.J. Hooker. I don't live on Starship NCC-1701, or own a phaser. And I don't know anybody named Bones, Sulu, or Spock. — William Shatner

Come on," he said to Valentine one day. "Let's fly away and live forever."
"We can't," she said. "There are miracles even relativity can't pull off, Ender."
"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."
"So, stay."
"I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it."
So they boarded a starship and went from world to world. Wherever they stopped, he was always Andrew Wiggin, itinerant speaker for the dead, and she was always Valentine, historian errant, writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead. And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time. — Orson Scott Card

You can't?" Cyprian barked out a laugh. "The Bloody Baroness does whatever she wants. Even if it means stealing a starship in the middle of the night, crashing it into the side of a mountain, and slaughtering an innocent girl in the process. — Sasha Alsberg

Sometimes Duane imagined that he was the single crewman on a receding starship, already light-years from Earth, unable to turn around, doomed never to return, unable even to reach his destination in a human lifetime, but still connected by this expanding arc of electromagnetic radiation, rising now through the onionlike layers of old radio shows, traveling back in time as he traveled forward in space, listening to voices whose owners had long since died, moving back toward Marconi and then silence. — Dan Simmons

PICARD: There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy.
WESLEY: But William James won't be in my Starfleet exams.
PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship.
WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy
PICARD: It takes more. Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something. — Gene Roddenberry

So, what's the status?" said Ira as he pulled himself down to his couch.
"Will is turning into a starship," Hugo replied, clearly only half in jest. "We're about to watch history in the making. — Alex Lamb

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space. — Alastair Reynolds

Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good. — Thomas Pynchon

The young man named Peter took her hand and led her into the starship. The door closed behind them. A moment later, the starship disappeared. — Anonymous

Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness ... — Thomas Pynchon