Top 300 John Scalzi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “You say ‘cure.’ I hear ’you’re not human enough.”

— John Scalzi

103. “This brings me back to my question about my karma,” Wilson said. “You probably set kittens on fire,” Schmidt said. “And the rest of us were probably there with you, with skewers.”

— John Scalzi

104. “A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case, before memory or information can be stored, someone must decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone must curate.”

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

106. “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

107. “I’m trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. A nice thing to wonder about when you’re thirty.”

— John Scalzi

108. “Not that I expected him to know; he didn’t exactly have the “programmer” look to him, if you know what I mean. He’d be the programmer’s boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays.”

— John Scalzi

109. “The supply transport’s on autopilot most of the way down anyway. I’m just on board so that if it crashes, they can say someone died.”

— John Scalzi

110. “They were the only people in all the universe who were not conscious. Although every creature could think and reason, it could not know itself as every other intelligent creature could know itself. The creatures lacked awareness of who they were as individuals, even as they lived and thrived and grew on the face of the moon of the planet.”

— John Scalzi

111. “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

112. “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

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

— John Scalzi

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

122. “The half-life between story of the century and not even the story of the day is quicker than you would ever guess.”

— John Scalzi

123. “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

124. “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

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

— John Scalzi

126. “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

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

— John Scalzi

128. “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

129. “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

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

— John Scalzi

131. “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

132. “Well, I miss my wife, you know,” I said. “But I also miss the feeling of, I don’t know, comfort. The sense you’re where you’re supposed to be, with someone you’re supposed to be with.”

— John Scalzi

133. “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

134. “Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live.”

— John Scalzi

135. “Look,” I said. “Something that needs your attention. Over there. Away from here.”

— John Scalzi

136. “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

137. “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

138. “I thought this was a matter of some urgency, Harry.” “It is,” I said. “But I fell from the sky today. I could use a couple of waffles.”

— John Scalzi

139. “What is it like when you lose someone you love?” Jane asked. “You die, too. And you wait around for your body to catch up.”

— John Scalzi

140. “But everyone knows you need fireworks to make independence official.”

— John Scalzi

141. “This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically.”

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

143. “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

144. “I live the life I live, and it’s the only life I have. No one else is out there in the universe living my alternate lives, and even if they were, I wouldn’t be worrying about them because I have my life to live here, now.”

— John Scalzi

145. “Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals.”

— John Scalzi

146. “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

147. “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

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

— John Scalzi

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

— John Scalzi

150. “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