The Best of Connie Willis Quotes

“I was flying out to Connecticut for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane and by the time I got to New Haven I was so worried about Frodo and Sam that I said to my boyfriend, “It’s awful. They’re trying to sneak into Mordor and the Ringwraiths are after them and I don’t trust Gollum and …” and I completely forgot to break up with him. And, as of yesterday, we’ve been married thirty-nine years.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we're not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we're going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can't quite put our finger on and can only guess at.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“It was the Communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren't guilty at all.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’?”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“At first glance, this seems an improbable scenario due to both the Martians’ and Emily Dickinson’s dispositions. Dickinson was a recluse who didn’t meet anybody, preferring to hide upstairs when neighbors came to call and to float notes down on them.14 Various theories have been advanced for her self-imposed hermitude, including Bright’s Disease, an unhappy love affair, eye trouble, and bad skin. T. L. Mensa suggests the simpler theory that all the rest of the Amherstonians were morons.15 None of these explanations would have made it likely that she would like Martians any better than Amherstates, and there is the added difficulty that, having died in 1886, she would also have been badly decomposed.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“Which one's in the main theater?"

"I don't know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons."

"Do you have any dice?" I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory not Newtonian. It didn't matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment and David was already in flight.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“People are always surprised and disturbed by Emily Dickinson's 'reclusive' lifestyle and come up with all sorts of theories to explain her staying in her room, doing her gardening at night, and vanishing upstairs whenever visitors came to call: depression, a skin condition that wouldn't let her out in the sun, lupus, a love affair that ended badly and that she never got over, agoraphobia, epilepsy, etc.

I, however, find her behavior completely understandable. She lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, for God's sake.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories