Top 70 Connie Willis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “This is the Victorian era,” she said. “Women didn’t have to make sense.”

— Connie Willis

2. “Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.”

— Connie Willis

3. “Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”

— Connie Willis

4. “It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances.”

— Connie Willis

5. “Translated ‘Non omnia possumus omnus’ as ‘No possums allowed on the omnibus.”

— Connie Willis

6. “Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?”

— Connie Willis

7. “It is the end of the world. Surely you could be allowed a few carnal thoughts.”

— Connie Willis

8. “Mentally competent people believe all kinds of goofy things.”

— Connie Willis

9. “But, gentle friend, for love and courtesy, lie further off.” – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream The.”

— Connie Willis

10. “How much of an effect on history can an animal have? A big one. Look at Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, and “the little gentleman in the black fur coat” who’d killed King William the Third when his horse stepped in the mole’s front door. And Richard the Third standing on the field at Bosworth and shouting, “My kingdom for a horse!”

— Connie Willis

11. “When you’re a writer, the question people always ask you is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Writers hate this question. It’s like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Where do you get your leeches?” You don’t get ideas. Ideas get you.”

— Connie Willis

12. “It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.”

— Connie Willis

13. “Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else – cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments – as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time.”

— Connie Willis

14. “Time is the fire in which we burn. – Delmore Schwartz.”

— Connie Willis

15. “If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.”

— Connie Willis

16. “I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.”

— Connie Willis

17. “Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.”

— Connie Willis

18. “The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.”

— Connie Willis

19. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

— Connie Willis

20. “To do something for someone or something you loved-England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history-wasn’t a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.”

— Connie Willis

21. “It is not an easy thing to put on a wet sock.”

— Connie Willis

22. “It’s strange. When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.”

— Connie Willis

23. “I hate sequels. They’re never as good as the first book.”

— Connie Willis

24. “None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one’s never thought of does.”

— Connie Willis

25. “History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats.”

— Connie Willis

26. “Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it’s possible to be an artist and a good person.”

— Connie Willis

27. “History was full of divergence points nobody could get anywhere near – from Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination to the battle of Trafalgar. Events so critical and so volatile that the introduction of a single variable – such as a time traveler – could change the outcome. And alter the entire course of history.”

— Connie Willis

28. “Nothing can save you, not youth or beauty or wealth, not intelligence or power or courage. You are all alone, in the middle of the ocean, with the lights going out.”

— Connie Willis

29. “A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.”

— Connie Willis

30. “That’s what the movies do. They don’t entertain us, they don’t send the message: ‘We care.’ They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.”

— Connie Willis

31. “Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.”

— Connie Willis

32. “One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober.”

— Connie Willis

33. “There are some things one is born to wear, and I had obviously been fated to wear this hat.”

— Connie Willis

34. “Nothing in all those “O swan” poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit.”

— Connie Willis

35. “Io suuicien lui damo amo,” she said softly. “You are here in place of the friends I love.”

— Connie Willis

36. “Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.”

— Connie Willis

37. “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

38. “People will buy anything at jumble sales,′ I said. ‘At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.”

— Connie Willis

39. “After all, Americans can be terrifying.”

— Connie Willis

40. “She watched him a while longer and then shut her eyes again. And even though she knew her hand was tucked beneath her cheek and he was on the far side of the room, the instant she closed her eyes he was there beside her again, his hands crossed on his chest and her hand held tightly under them, pressed safely against his heart. Who.”

— Connie Willis

41. “Kivrin reached out for Dunworthy’s hand and clasped it tightly in her own. “I knew you’d come,” she said, and the net opened.”

— Connie Willis

42. “I have great faith in the future of books – no matter what form they may take – and of science fiction.”

— Connie Willis

43. “One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be ‘responsive to their patrons’.”

— Connie Willis

44. “And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.”

— Connie Willis

45. “There was a crack of thunder so loud I was convinced I’d been struck by lightning for lying.”

— Connie Willis

46. “I remember an aunt saying sagely, “The good die young.” Not exactly a motivation to behave yourself.”

— Connie Willis

47. “Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Wicked. Rent. The Music Man. Almost any musical will do. Except Cats.” “Why? Doesn’t it shut out the voices?” “No, it shuts them out fine. But it’s a terrible musical.”

— Connie Willis

48. “You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about.”

— Connie Willis

49. “I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. – From an interview on the podcast Starship Sofa, December 2010.”

— Connie Willis

50. “There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.”

— Connie Willis