[confused]

Does anybody have any favorite one-liners from science fiction books ? I know that they're not as important in literature as in film or theatre, but do people have their treasured snippets of wit ? My top two are problably : "My God, it's full of stars !" (which is probably misquoted) from 2001, and
"bless 'em, bash 'em, hack 'em, slash 'em. It's the new-wave philosophy for dealing with the forces of evil.
Does it work ?
No, but it's fun"

from The Quasimodo walk by JR Brennan (which is really more fantasy). Any other nominations ?

[Archren]

Most of the first book of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes to mind...:D

[lemming]

"So high, so low, so many things to know" from A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. :cool:

(And then there's the slang... in my mind I actually use "pos-def" and "weirdwired" from Orbital Resonance by John Barnes. And "grokked", of course, which I like as a word even if I never did gro--understand that darn book. )

[ironchef texmex]

If we're talking about narrative and not just dialogue, the opening line from "A Scanner Darkly"

Once there was a man who spent all day picking the bugs out of his hair.

[funky_fantasist]

"It was the day my grandmother exploded." Iain Banks - 'The Crow Road"
I *know* not really SF but he does write it sometimes so you gotta let me have it! ;)


I did laugh at the "My God, it's full of stars" thing.
My dog - then a young pup - would eat just about anything. When we moved house he managed to find a pot of sequins and get the lid off... (yep, you know where this is going huh?)

My DH had the unfortunate job of cleaning up the carnage - which included the sequins which had been... erm... through the dog. As he cleaned it up he wryly commented: "My God, it's full of stars!"
ROFL! No wonder I married him!!!

Cheers
Funky
:D

[MindsEye]

ZOE - "Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?"

SHEPHERD BOOK - "Very specific. But it gets rather fuzzy in the area of kneecaps." (Firefly - War Stories)

Not from a SciFi book, but from on of the best SciFi TV shows ever made IMHO. Hopefully the movie will bring it back to life.


ME

[emohawk]

I've posted it before when I read it, but the only thing that I can recall instantly to mind is Poul Anderson's The High Crusade. It has a great line in it when one of the Knight's is trying to bignote his nobility to the aliens:

"An ancestor of mine, by the name of Noah, was once Admiral of the combined fleets of my planet".

Appeals to my sense of humour anyway :)

[wordsarepoison]

Not exactly a one-liner, but I love it.

"It's not all that long ago, for instance, that you were prepared to accept that you were en route to a distant solar system to be vivsected by alien frogs. If you could believe that, this ought to be a slice of Victoria Sponge." From Falling Sideways. I love Tom Holt.

"George looked uncomfortable, as if he'd just discovered a hedgehog in his trousers." As previous.:D