Top 300 John Scalzi Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It’s a cat,” I said. “If Donut wants to spend time with you he’ll show up in your room and sit on your important things.”

— John Scalzi

102. “I’m a seething cauldron of disconnected rage on the inside, Lieutenant.” “Ah, repression,” Keyes said. “Excellent. Try to avoid taking a potshot at me when you finally blow, please.” “I can’t promise anything, sir,” Alan said.”

— John Scalzi

103. “You’re all so busy tending to your own personal tree that you don’t look around to see that the forest is on fire.”

— John Scalzi

104. “The Yherajk were a less immediate but infinitely more complicated problem – alien globs who want to befriend a humanity that, if asked, would probably prefer to be befriended by something with an endoskeleton.”

— John Scalzi

105. “Moeller also immediately discounted insults about competence, as the incompetent never question their competence about anything.”

— John Scalzi

106. “Hide’ isn’t a word we like to use,” Cassaway said. “‘Perform alternative tasks’ is the preferred term.”

— John Scalzi

107. “The story of how I left Huckleberry begins – as do all worthy stories – with a goat.”

— John Scalzi

108. “I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

— John Scalzi

109. “What was your job back on Earth? I’ve always been curious. I taught eighth-grade math in Tallahassee. Huh, I said. That’s not what I expected. Are you kidding? Powell said back. You try teaching algebra to a bunch of little shitheads for thirty-eight years straight. The way I figure it I’ve got about another decade before my rage from that gets entirely burned up.”

— John Scalzi

110. “It’s hard to sell the official story to people who can see things for themselves.”

— John Scalzi

111. “Q’eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of “I offer you the bread of life,” but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into “Let us violate cakes together.”

— John Scalzi

112. “Hickory clicked something to Dickory in their native tongue; Dickory clicked back. Hickory responded, and Dickory replied, it seemed a bit forcefully. And then, God help me, Hickory actually sighed.”

— John Scalzi

113. “I don’t know that it will matter even then,” Cardenia said. “I’m continually confronted with the human tendency to ignore or deny facts until the last possible instant. And then for several days after that, too.”

— John Scalzi

114. “Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults.”

— John Scalzi

115. “Are we agreed that the goal here is survival, not a win?”

— John Scalzi

116. “Realborn go for years without the slightest clue what they’re going to do with themselves. From what I understand, some of them never actually figure it out. They just walk through life in a daze and then fall into their graves at the end of it.”

— John Scalzi

117. “But we get to live as long as we’re useful. And that is a rare privilege.”

— John Scalzi

118. “I have the power to call you here. As I have the power to condemn you to death. I hope we understand each other.”

— John Scalzi

119. “I love her more than I actually express in words – an irony for a writer – and am every day genuinely amazed I get to spend my life with her.”

— John Scalzi

120. “The answer to that is complicated.” “Give me the short version.” “The short version is ‘Yes, but.’ The slightly longer version is ‘No, and.’ Which version would you like?”

— John Scalzi

121. “You threw him into space?” “Yup.” “And he didn’t die?” “We only threw him out a little bit.” Marce.”

— John Scalzi

122. “Having Monday be Pizza Day subverts the natural order of things.”

— John Scalzi

123. “I do have a sense of adventure,” I said. “It’s overawed by my sense of self-preservation.”

— John Scalzi

124. “If you’re the best that the Earth has got to offer, it’s time we bend over and get a tentacle right up the ass.”

— John Scalzi

125. “When a lie has negative consequences, people dislike it. But otherwise? They move on, and eventually the lie as a lie is forgotten, or in this case, codified as the foundation of religious practice and buffed and sanded into something prettier and more congenial.”

— John Scalzi

126. “I’m continually confronted with the human tendency to ignore or deny facts until the last possible instant. And then for several days after that, too.” Attavio.”

— John Scalzi

127. “The rest of the rebels were recruited from the ranks of the young and excitable and had rather more enthusiasm than skill.”

— John Scalzi

128. “Praise is always a good thing, especially in a crisis.”

— John Scalzi

129. “Occam’s razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone’s ass was usually the correct one.”

— John Scalzi

130. “Anyone can be a prophet. You just have to say that what you’re talking about is a reflection of God. Or of the gods. Or of some divine spirit. However you want to put it. Whether those things come true isn’t one way or another about it.”

— John Scalzi

131. “Then: “What time is it in Arizona?” “It’s two hours behind here, so about eight thirty,” I said. “Maybe. Arizona is weird about time zones.”

— John Scalzi

132. “Don’t discount that part of who he was just because you didn’t know it. None of us are all of who we are to any one person.”

— John Scalzi

133. “The Jenna Situation, as you recalled it now, had been fraught with fraughtiness.”

— John Scalzi

134. “I looked at Fowler, who had had a bullet applied directly to her forehead.”

— John Scalzi

135. “And also because I know if I’ve figured it out, someone else has too, because there’s always someone else smarter out there, who may not have ethics.”

— John Scalzi

136. “Imagine a migraine, on top of a hangover, while sitting in a kindergarten of thirty screaming children, who are all taking turns stabbing you in the eye with an ice pick.”

— John Scalzi

137. “Pope was aware there were other ways to get more diplomatic respect than bigger guns, of course. But while other diplomatic maneuvers sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, ultimately a big damn gun always commanded respect.”

— John Scalzi

138. “You do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn’t cost you much to do it. I’d rather apologize for something I didn’t really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance.”

— John Scalzi

139. “Oh for God’s sake how divine can I be? My feet hurt, I have gas and I need to pee.”

— John Scalzi

140. “It’s not whether she tells everyone,” Huma said. “It’s whether they believe her.” “It’s the truth.” “Oh, my daughter,” Huma said, and smiled. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how little that actually means.”

— John Scalzi

141. “If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.”

— John Scalzi

142. “In one hand I have a restraining order, and in the other I have a Taser. Which would you like to meet first?”

— John Scalzi

143. “We buy time where we may.” “You bought yourself time,” Oi agreed. “I don’t think it’s of very good quality.”

— John Scalzi

144. “How did you get here, anyway?” “It’s classified.” “I’m close enough to stab you with a fork.”

— John Scalzi

145. “Is it painful?” the groundskeeper asked. “I am asking for science.”

— John Scalzi

146. “I don’t care whether I really exist or don’t, whether I’m real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate. That’s something I can work on. It’s what I’m working on now.”

— John Scalzi

147. “I both love and am terrified by Greg Van Eekhout’s vision of Los Angeles. I already want to go back.”

— John Scalzi

148. “Hey, you know what, basing an entire system of social, political and economic control on the vague, all-too-easily misinterpreted words of a single person claiming divine inspiration is probably not actually all that smart, now, is it.”

— John Scalzi

149. “I don’t think it matters what age you are when you figure it out,” Brous said. “I think the important thing is to figure it out before someone else tells you what you want to be, and they get it wrong.”

— John Scalzi

150. “Let’s just say that I anticipated that when I needed to leave Ponthieu, it would be suddenly, and that I might be chased. And that those chasing me might prefer that if I couldn’t be caught, that I should be rendered into very small pieces.”

— John Scalzi