Who said science fiction is just about space wars and time machines? I’ve rounded up some seriously profound and beautiful quotes from sci-fi books that’ll change how you see the genre. Far from cold science, these lines are all about emotion, insight, and wonder within the pages of sci-fi favorites. Let’s go!
1. “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
2. “We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”
— Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
3. “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.”
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
4. “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
5. “In my life I have found two things of priceless worth – learning and loving. Nothing else – not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake – can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say ‘I have learned’ and ‘I have loved,’ you will also be able to say ‘I have been happy.”
— Arthur C. Clarke, Rama II
6. “There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.”
— Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
7. “Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
8. “We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”
— P.D. James, The Children of Men
9. “Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along. Cue the music. Cue the dancers. Cue tomorrow.”
— Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera
10. “There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful.”
— Hugh Howey, Dust
11. “We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.”
— Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
12. “And we danced, on the brick of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
— John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
13. “The Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
14. “It’s not the end of the world at all. It’s only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”
— Nevil Shute, On the Beach
15. “Time is the cruelest force of all.”
— Liu Cixin, Death’s End
16. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
17. “Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.”
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
18. “Where a story ends is nothing more than a snapshot in time, a brief flash of emotion, a pause. How and if it continues is up to us.”
— Hugh Howey, Dust
19. “Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it.”
— Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen
20. “There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.”
— Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
And there you have it! Drop your favorite quotes in the comments, share on your socials, and don’t forget to check out more from the Rockle: