Top 100 Charlie Jane Anders Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If I could turn people into turtles, there would be turtles everywhere.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

52. “I’m older than that,” Patricia said. “I’m almost seven, in four months. Or five.” She heard Roberta getting closer, so she snatched up the bucket and took off running, deeper into the woods.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

53. “Diantha came so close to saying she would do whatever Patricia wanted, anything at all. And then it hit her: She was being Trickstered. She’d been this close to becoming a slave to her former best friend. Diantha backed away, almost tipping over a teak side table full of drinks.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

54. “Umm,” said Patricia. “Is the Endless Question going to take a long time? Because I bet my mom and dad are worried about me.” It was hitting her all over again that she was up way past her bedtime and she hadn’t had dinner and she was out in the middle of the freezing woods, not to mention she was still lost.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

55. “Discovering a new phobia was like the opposite of falling in love.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

56. “Serafina was late for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

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

— Charlie Jane Anders

58. “The bookstore had no musty “old books” smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

59. “At the end of a few weeks’ solitude, Laurence ran into Serafina, his ex-girlfriend, and got roped into going to dinner with her. At least she wouldn’t ask what happened in Denver. They went to a cavernous tapas place that was still hanging in there at 16th and Valencia, though its prices had gone way up. Laurence drank too much sangria and looked into Serafina’s candle-lit face, her cheekbones thrown into relief, and he found himself saying, “You know, you’ll always be the one who got away.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

60. “It’s his life. One tends to privilege personal insights in such matters.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

61. “I have not spoken to a living person,” the Tree said, forming the words syllable by syllable, “in many seasons. You were distressed. What is wrong?” Its voice sounded like the wind blowing through an old bellows, or the lowest note playing on a big wooden recorder.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

62. “Patricia decided there was nothing to do but climb the nearest tree and see if she could see anything from it. Like a road. Or a house. Or some landmark that Dirrp might recognize.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

63. “Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

64. “Their house had been a spice shop a hundred years ago, and it still smelled of cinnamon and turmeric and saffron and garlic and a little sweat. The perfect hardwood floors had been walked on by visitors from India and China and everywhere, bringing everything spicy in the world. If Patricia closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could imagine the people unloading wooden foil-lined crates stamped with names of cities like Marrakesh and Bombay.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

65. “Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

66. “The not-understanding was worse than anything else, it was like a mystery and a wound that couldn’t heal and an unforgivable failure.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

67. “And at the last, a war between magic and science that would leave the world in ashes. At the center of all this were a man and a woman, who were still children now.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

68. “What was worse, being crazy or being evil?”

— Charlie Jane Anders

69. “You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

70. “These things were made of hubris, because they always broke down, or worse, broke everything. But maybe Laurence had been right and these devices were what made us unique, as humans. We made machines, the way spiders made silk.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

71. “Problem solving and troubleshooting were a source of pleasure for both of them, and narrating the process was the next best thing to doing it. The same neural pathways lit up when you talked your way through the maze as when you actually solved it. Except this time, you were bathed in the glow of having already unraveled the thing.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

72. “Good choice.” Now she was checking out Laurence’s wrist. “Hey. That’s a two-second time machine, isn’t it?” “Um, yeah,” Laurence said.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

73. “Hey, it’s a bird!” a voice said from the darkness just as Patricia reached the ground. “Come here, bird. I only want to bite you.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

74. “Patricia waited until Tommington had reached the top, then swung down the other side of the tree, dropping from branch to branch so fast she almost pulled her arm out, and then landed on the ground on her butt with an oof. “Hey,” Tommington said from the top of the tree, where his big eyes caught the moonlight. “Where did you go? Come back here!”

— Charlie Jane Anders

75. “Maybe increasing the aggregate level of happiness in the world is one way to try and hold back the crash.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

76. “If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

77. “Tommington,” Dirrp said. “He’s a cat. He lives in a house with people, but he comes into the forest and kills a lot of my friends. The Parliament is always debating what to do about him.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

78. “Patricia paused in a small clearing of maples near the back door. “It’s okay,” she told the bird. “I’ll take you home. There’s an old birdcage in the attic. I know where to find it. It’s a nice cage, it has a perch and a swing. I’ll put you in there, I’ll tell my parents. If anything happens to you, I will hold my breath until I faint. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

79. “Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

80. “Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

81. “You celebrated the small victories, and you dreamed of the big ones to come.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

82. “Worry is often a symptom of imperfect information.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

83. “People who told you to “think fast” were always those who thought much more slowly than you did. And they only said it when they were about to do something to contribute to the collective mental inertia.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

84. “I have a pretty reasonably shrewd idea of where we go from here,” said Dirrp. “At least, a sort of a notion.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

85. “But,” Patricia said, more startled that the bird was refusing her protection than that he was speaking to her. “I can keep you safe. I can bring you bugs or seeds or whatever.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

86. “This time, I’m just going to do it. I’m going to cure him. Because why not? It would be so easy.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

87. “What was it?” Serafina wandered off to look at yogurt-covered pretzels, probably annoyed at him for talking on the phone. Her long fingers lifted the packets of white twists, as though plucking flowers. Her nose twitched and she smiled, as if the pretzels had told her a joke. I will not let you get away, he said to Serafina in his mind.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

88. “I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

89. “Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

90. “His life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

91. “He just wanted to be left alone and maybe have people get his name right if they had to talk to him.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

92. “I don’t actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all.” Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. “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. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

93. “On the long drive home, Laurence tuned out his parents explaining to him that life isn’t an adventure, for chrissake, life is a long slog and a series of responsibilities and demands. When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

94. “And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

95. “I showed my magic to a civilian one time, and it got ugly.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

96. “That’s the problem with grand social ideas in general, they break if you put too much weight on them.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

97. “As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are ‘I don’t care what happens to these people.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

98. “That’s what history is, really,” Bianca says, “the process for turning idiots into visionaries.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

99. “I can’t do this thing anymore, where we live in a tiny space and pretend it’s the whole world. People always have brand-new reasons for doing the same thing over and over.”

— Charlie Jane Anders

100. “You could do whatever you felt like in Argelo, but so could everybody else.”

— Charlie Jane Anders