Top 100 Charlie Jane Anders Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Genres are like the surface of the ocean. There are waves and things moving, but you don’t instantly see all the reefs and ecosystems that’s happening beneath the surface.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

2. “You know... no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

3. “Knowledge is justice.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

4. “Live every day as if you’ve come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

5. “Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violence. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

6. “When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

7. “Society is the choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

8. “Loose ends are cool... Loose ends mean that you are still living your life. The person who dies with the most loose ends wins.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

9. “No,” the bird said. “Please! Don’t lock me up. I would prefer you just kill me now.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

10. “People really don’t understand the technology they’re using. It’s been talked about a lot. Apple products in particular are designed in such a way that’s harder to get in and understand what processes are going on.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

11. “Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

12. “If you’re a writer, you don’t serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you’re writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don’t have to have someone thrown out an airlock.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

13. “I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

14. “We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

15. “Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It’s more that nature’s playing field is full of traps.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

16. “The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,” said Kevin. “There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

17. “I found a wounded bird,” Patricia said. “It can’t fly, its wing is ruined.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

18. “We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

19. “But the real point is, how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses?”

— Charlie Jane Anders

20. “What?” Patricia looked at her knees, through the thready holes in her denim overalls, and thought her kneecaps looked like weird eggs. “What?” She looked over at the sparrow in the bucket, who was in turn studying her with one eye, as if trying to decide whether to trust her.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

21. “Patricia didn’t look back. She heard Tommington yelling for a long time, until they crossed a big line of trees. They got lost twice more, and at one point Dirrp began weeping into his good wing, before they stumbled across the track that led to the secret Tree. And from there, it was just a steep backbreaking climb, up a slope studded with hidden roots.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

22. “Trust hipsters to make even the collapse of civilization unbearably twee.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

23. “There are no requirements when you’re using a particular genre. It’s not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

24. “Hernan always says that a perfect moment of beauty can last forever. But maybe some moments are so ugly that they never end, either. All you can do is be patient with yourself.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

25. “Now Laurence felt self-conscious. People should not see him having a crazy argument with his Caddy – with Peregrine. He hustled away from the beach, away from Judah and the tiny hippie outpost, heading Sloatward. Losing himself in the night, in the Outer Outer Sunset.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

26. “Magic was always bound to claim her in the end, in retrospect, but love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

27. “Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

28. “I think that technology is much more mysterious to the people using it than, say, the automobile was. This isn’t an original observation, but a lot of the smart devices people rely on now really do feel like magic to a lot of us.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

29. “The only thing that makes life tolerable is that people forget most of the stupid things I say as soon as I finish saying them.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

30. “I mean, we’re grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we’ve grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it’s probably healthy. I mean, little kids don’t have to make decisions, unless something’s very wrong. Maybe you can’t make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much. You know?”

— Charlie Jane Anders

31. “A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

32. “The trap that can be ignored is no trap.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

33. “He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

34. “I wish I still had my grandmother’s ring so I could give it to her the right way. Except now, he was also thinking, Please god let me not blow this, let this not be a huge mistake.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

35. “I found a wounded bird,” Patricia said. “It can’t fly, its wing is ruined.” “I bet I can make it fly,” Roberta said, and Patricia knew she was talking about her rocket launcher. “Bring it here. I’ll make it fly real good.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

36. “Well.” The bird seemed to think about this for a moment. “You don’t know how to heal a broken wing, do you?” He flapped his bad wing. He’d looked just sort of gray-brown at first, but up close she could see brilliant red and yellow streaks along his wings, with a milk-white belly and a dark, slightly barbed beak.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

37. “I am, as you know, a fan of nature, said Reginald. And yet, nature doesn’t find ways to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

38. “Listen to yourself, hear your own footsteps, your breaths, your heartbeats, oh, how many rhythms you make as you come and go! you are an orchestra.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

39. “People here are not accustomed to seeing economic disputes settled with guns, but every economy runs on bullets, one way or another.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

40. “Captivity is worse than death for a bird like me,” the sparrow said. “Listen. You can hear me talking. Right? That means you’re special. Like a witch! Or something. And that means you have a duty to do the right thing. Please.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

41. “Every human can be a wizard.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

42. “If I could turn people into turtles, there would be turtles everywhere.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

43. “All this time as a mad scientist why didn’t he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

44. “At last they were on top of the tree, which swayed a little in the wind. Tommington was not following them. Patricia looked around twice in all directions before she saw a round fur shape scampering on the ground nearby. “Stupid cat!” she shouted. “Stupid cat! You can’t get us!”

— Charlie Jane Anders

45. “People who told you to “think fast” were always those who thought much more slowly than you did.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

46. “We’re doing serious research here,” said Tanaa. “Nothing is a toy. Well, except for Six-Fingered Steve.” She gestured at the tiny tap-dancing robot, who heard his name and made jazz hands with too many digits. Disturbing, as always.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

47. “Maybe you don’t get to choose how you make peace, or what kind of peace you make. You count yourself lucky if peace doesn’t run away from you.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

48. “Your friend would control nature,” said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. “A witch must serve nature.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

49. “Earlier, if you had a piece of technology, anyone could theoretically take it apart and put it back together again, and understand how it works. Some people would do that with the technology that they owned. It’s not as easy to do that today. Most users wouldn’t even think to do anything like that.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

50. “We’re lost in the woods,” Patricia said with a shiver. “I’m probably going to be eaten by a bear.”

— Charlie Jane Anders