Steampunk Quotes

Not another word, not another thought, not another sniffle. If you need to pass gas, I pray you'll clench your backside and keep walking until we are certainly alone.

~ S.c. Barrus

The tools of their trade were simple, effective things: iron knuckles, saps and the like. But the iconic tool of the scuttler arsenal was a woven leather belt with a heavy iron or brass buckle used to decrease intelligence one wallop at a time.

~ S.c. Barrus

When John-Joseph Heller's fights became too much of a sure thing, story has it he moved on to more risky fights with grown men and even starved dogs. Though he was scarred often, he was never beaten. But as he brought each opponent to his knees, John-Joseph Heller was also growing up and his vision began to extend further than the ring.

~ S.c. Barrus

The machines of this place are failing, and the woman and I are here all alone. The perpetual motion engine, as brilliant and beautiful as it is, is running down—nothing lasts forever. But before this little world falls out of the sky there still might be time enough for redemption. There is still time for me to say the words that I should have had the courage to say at the beginning.There is still time, perhaps, for one more miracle.Hello, Miranda.

~ Dexter Palmer

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

~ Dexter Palmer

She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgement and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky.

~ Dexter Palmer

hand. I was charged with organizing the messages: descriptions of the creatures, descriptions of their space vessels, descriptions of their conveyances, of their weapons, of their movements. Positions of our soldiers, of our allies’ soldiers. Troop movements. New arrivals of space vessels. Reports of casualties. Dear God, the casualties. And their descriptions. Charred piles of ash; bloodless carcases; crumpled, broken bodies; crushed jelly; roasted, dead meat. All…in these hands.

~ Stephanie Osborn

It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.

~ K.w. Jeter

As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street’s surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume.

~ A.f. Stewart

We're fragile things, Harb. It doesn't look like it but we are. We're here one minute, and just like that, we're gone. The Peacemakers (The Nemesis Engines)

~ Olivier A. Blanchard

These violators responded only as cowards could. They ran.

~ Cynthia D. Witherspoon

she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

~ Philip Pullman

Be happy. Be free. You have a universe inside you.

~ Sophia Elaine Hanson

And then there was an explosion.

~ Adrienne Kress

Never before had he seen a woman so angry—or so seductive. It rendered him speechless. He couldn’t fight the compulsion to kiss her.She punched him on the chin, snapping his head back.

~ Gwynn White

He could sit in the dust and dark of the carriage house and rot for the rest of his life. Clearly that's what he wished to do. It was not my place to get in the way of so profound a destiny.

~ Kristin Bailey

The Girauds' child was looking more and more like a problem.Luke pressed his lips into a thin line. When she'd leaned in the stagecoach blazing with fervor over what was in the arcane books, it had taken all his willpower not to throw a bolt of magic to stop her heart.

~ Ann Gimpel

My station has barely recovered from the massacre, and we have not held my formal coronation, not to mention the fact I am only eighteen years of age and have no parent present. How on earth do people expect me to find a husband in all of this nonsense?

~ Courtney Brandt

Let us fly, Madam Harpy Queen. Show me how you dance on the wind.

~ Lita Burke

After four marriages, and four deaths, she had everything in life a woman might desire: titled position, swollen coffers, the freedom to travel, and a world that accepted her because it was afraid of her.

~ Gail Carriger

Gavin tried not to stare at the lobster. He decided not to inquire further. Whatever Jack's reasoning, best to accept that crustaceans were necessary to his view of the world.

~ Gail Carriger

Mortals trotted about in shoes and corsets made to limit movement, fashion for prey.

~ Gail Carriger

So this is how the merchant ship won’t follow us,” I mumbled, “They aren’t insane enough to join the party.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»

~ Bruce Sterling

It takes use to make knowledge worthwhile.

~ J.s. Morin

Rejoice in the colours…

~ Michelle Frost

The last thing I remembered was joining the crew in a rendition of “Take to the Sky,” but the rest of the time blurred after I drank absinthe with the Captain.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

OMG YOU GUYS it has come to my attention that SOMEONE on the internet is saying that my fictional 19th century zombies are NOT SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND. Naturally, I am crushed. To think, IF ONLY I’d consulted with a zombologist or two before sitting down to write, I could’ve avoided ALL THIS EMBARRASSMENT.

~ Cherie Priest

It was during Latin that the Austro-Hungarians arrived with their dogs and zombies to kill everyone at the Eden College for Young Ladies.

~ David Wake

Goons were the lowest sort of homunculi, only superior to zombies.

~ Lita Burke

The important question is, what will your wear for a wedding dress, Alexia? You look horrible in white.

~ Gail Carriger

But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity.

~ Craig Hallam