Michael Bishop

Michael Lawson Bishop (November 12, 1945 – November 13, 2023) was an award-winning American science fiction and fantasy writer.

Quotes

Short fiction

Cri de Coeur (1994)

Page number from the reprint in Gardner Dozois (ed.), The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twelfth Annual Collection, ISBN 0-312-13222-0

• Tiglathpileser was a human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone.
  • p. 433

A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975)

All page numbers from the mass market first edition published by Ballantine Books ISBN 0-345-24350-1

• What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?
  • Chapter 1, “Planetfall: The Hawks of Conscience” (p. 33)

• God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is.
  • Chapter 2, “Covenant: Derringer and Dascra” (p. 34)

• I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative.
  • Chapter 2, “Covenant: Derringer and Dascra” (p. 35)

• What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.
  • Chapter 2, “Covenant: Derringer and Dascra” (p. 41)

• Coercion is the tool of the desperate.
  • Chapter 3, “Superstitions: A Night Piece” (p. 64)

• Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?
  • Chapter 4, “Enlightenment: Down on the Edgegleam Plains” (p. 75)

• “Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.”
  “The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.”
  “Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.”
  • Chapter 4, “Enlightenment: Down on the Edgegleam Plains” (p. 83)

• Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced.
  • Chapter 5, “Ambivalence: The Children of the Ouemartsee” (p. 92)

• The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.
  • Chapter 5, “Ambivalence: The Children of the Ouemartsee” (p. 93)

• But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody.
  • Chapter 6, “Inquisition: The Messiah Who Came Too Late” (p. 113)

• “Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?”
  “No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.”
  • Chapter 7, “Interlude: Heartseed and Tower” (p. 142)

• Both God and man hold each other in equally beautiful contempt.
  • Chapter 11, “Usurpation: Two Meteors, Prodigal of Light” (p. 196)

• “Magistrate, a problem doesn’t cease to exist simply because you cease to consider it a problem.”
  ”Very often, Deputy Foutlif, it does.”
  • Chapter 11, “Usurpation: Two Meteors, Prodigal of Light” (p. 200)

• Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.
  • Chapter 12, “Debacle: The Swarmings” (p. 240)

• Like all such prophecies, it’s impressive only if not examined too closely.
  • Chapter 13, “Aftermath: Sarcophagi and Coffins” (p. 249)

• He forgave these Tropemen, then felt contempt for himself for the presumption of extending forgiveness, then forgave again, then cursed his own vanity, forgave once more, condemned his presumption, and at last forgave even himself.
  • Chapter 14, “Denouement: Ascent to the Acropolis” (p. 265)

• A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing.
  • Chapter 14, “Denouement: Ascent to the Acropolis” (p. 266)

No Enemy But Time (1982)

All page numbers from the mass market edition published by Bantam Books

• Necessary is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention.
  • Chapter 10 “Fruit of the Looms” (p. 76)

• Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.
  • Chapter 17 “Pensacola, Florida” (p. 147)

• Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.
  • Chapter 18 “In a Season of Drought” (p. 158)

• You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one.
  • Chapter 23 “Panama City, Florida” (p. 206)

• They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river.
  • Chapter 30 “Marakoi, Zarakal” (p. 303)

• Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.
  “Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.
  • Chapter 30 “Marakoi, Zarakal” (p. 315; closing words)

• Time, as it always does, passed.
  • Coda (p. 316)