Connie Willis

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis (born 31 December 1945) is an American science fiction writer.

Sourced

Fire Watch (1982)

Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1983 and Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1982

• I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?
  • (pp. 129-130 in The Nebula Awards 18 edited by Robert Silverberg)

Doomsday Book (1992)

All page numbers from the mass market paperback published by Bantam Spectra

• “They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of service.
  “It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”
  • Chapter 14 (p. 219)

• It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.
  • Chapter 20 (p. 320)

• Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.
  • Chapter 20 (p. 326)

• “The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”
  “God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”
  Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 496)

• Nobody deserves this. “Please,” she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked.
  Whatever it was, it was not granted.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 498)

• It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 506)