"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 Literature See all quotes by Tim Powers →

React to this quote

More by Tim Powers

See all

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

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

“Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art.”

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

“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.”

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

Resonant Thoughts

"I make no vows. I take my chance. ... It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I…"

— George Bernard Shaw

Literature1856–1950

#time

"He's not really a difficult interview. You just have to catch the essence and rhythm of what he's saying. I'd ask him how baseball has changed over the past 25 years and he'd start telling me about hi…"

— Arnold Hano

Literature1922–2021

#time

"We have been given an assignment as a monarchy, and we do as well as we can … We try to be as little populistic as possible. We don't do anything on the spur of the moment to win an opinion poll, or s…"

— Harald V of Norway

Politics1937

#time

"The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. S…"

— Perry Anderson

Philosophy1938

#time