Tim Powers

He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet.

— Tim Powers

Love isn’t in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway.

— Tim Powers

“And you’ve never married.”“I don’t know any women well enough to hate ’em that much.”

— Tim Powers

“Solipsism,” said Felise. “I thought that too, for a while, but it was so obvious that my cat didn’t think so, didn’t think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn’t true.”

— Tim Powers

You protect the ones you love. He clung to the thought. Even if they ignorantly resent you for it.

— Tim Powers

“There’s something you should know about me.”“I don’t know, but you should know it.”

— Tim Powers

“Work out your own damnation,” he said breathlessly, “in fear and trembling.”

— Tim Powers

It struck Duffy that a touch of hysteria had sharpened the good fellowship tonight, as if the night wind whistling under the eaves carried some pollen of impermanence, making everyone nostalgic for things they hadn’t yet lost.

— Tim Powers

He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack...crack...crack of it was the only sound in the universe.

— Tim Powers

The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.

— Tim Powers

You’re still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you’re Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.

— Tim Powers

Trusting Merlin is like giving a migrant scorpion a lift inside your hat.

— Tim Powers

Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Maybe then I’ll be ashamed.

— Tim Powers

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

“You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, “that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?”Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn’t seem to have heard Joe. “There’s so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal...stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it’s greater than the action.”

— Tim Powers

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

— Tim Powers

Some people, he thought, simply have no will to survive—they’re walking hors d’oeuvres waiting for someone who can spare the time to devour them.

— Tim Powers

People are so tasty when they’re truly embittered, truly despairing...and that’s when they come to Sevatividam. They can’t stand the bitter rain, so they run in under one of the two awnings—religion or dissipation—and guess who’s waiting for them under both awnings at once...

— Tim Powers

And everybody there thought we were! So who cares? So I care—you are what people think you are, which is why it’s so important to get them thinking you’re someone who...counts. Gaah.

— Tim Powers

“How does my offer sound?”Rivas took a long thoughtful sip. “Let’s see,” he said finally. “It sounds insincere, impossible, and definitely, absolutely unattractive.”

— Tim Powers

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

— Tim Powers

“Whats o’clock?”And to-morrow’s doomsday.

— Tim Powers

He was dizzy, and it occurred to him that Newton must have been right when he’d said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him.

— Tim Powers

The church has become a more...exclusive club since the founder’s day, it’s clear. No doubt the Devil is more hospitable.

— Tim Powers

Every ruler wants to maintain the status quo.

— Tim Powers

Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several days past praying for rain; but the gods are either angry, or nature is too powerful.

— Tim Powers

The landlord crossed himself when they checked in, but an English ten-pound note for a week’s lodging overcame whatever superstitious misgivings the man may have had.

— Tim Powers

“God help us,” said Crawford softly.“If there is one.” Byron grinned. “A whole lot of ghastly things have turned out to be possible, remember.”

— Tim Powers

She’s probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she’ll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she’ll just want to return to the selfless haze?

— Tim Powers

He tried to put more conviction into his voice than he felt, and he mentally cursed any God that there might be, for having made this coming ordeal not only tremendously difficult and dangerous, but possibly pointless too.

— Tim Powers

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

— Tim Powers

Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player’s...luck.

— Tim Powers

I’m really willing to try to believe you’re not crazy, but you gotta help me a little, you know?

— Tim Powers

He thought about crossing his fingers, but clasped her hand instead.

— Tim Powers

People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.

— Tim Powers

Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.

— Tim Powers

It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me.

— Tim Powers

Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall.

— Tim Powers

Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?

— Tim Powers

“My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, “before she became a bruja.”

— Tim Powers

An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.

— Tim Powers

How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?

— Tim Powers

He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.

— Tim Powers

White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.

— Tim Powers

All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.

— Tim Powers

Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.

— Tim Powers

Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?

— Tim Powers

Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.

— Tim Powers

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

— Tim Powers

He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?

— Tim Powers

“Hey,” Bozzaris said, “nobody’s human.” It was an old Mossad line, a mixture of “nobody’s perfect” and “I’m only human.”

— Tim Powers

Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men.

— Tim Powers

“That’s me, that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?”“One future, not the future. There isn’t any the future.”

— Tim Powers

“We’re going to have a séance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass.”“First sensible remark all night,” said Charlotte.

— Tim Powers

By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong.

— Tim Powers

Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?

— Tim Powers

“William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. He’ll try to have children—he doesn’t believe any of this.”“And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped.

— Tim Powers

I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.

— Tim Powers

“She chose to reject me!”That wasn’t a choice, lad—that was an empty gun saying click.”

— Tim Powers

After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?”“I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”

— Tim Powers

“Doesn’t she read chicken entrails?”“Same sort of thing.”

— Tim Powers

“I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past,” she repeated. “It’s always out there, isn’t it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What’s the use of knowing what time it is, if it’s always changing? And it’s always later!”

— Tim Powers

“She did love us. Does.”“She loves you the way a drowning person loves somebody they can push down and climb on top of.”

— Tim Powers

When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face.

— Tim Powers

“I’d offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.”

— Tim Powers

“Did he say who he was?” asked Scott.“I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”

— Tim Powers

I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—

— Tim Powers