Quotessence
Home / Topics / Alternate History Quotes

Alternate History Quotes

Browse 69 quotes about Alternate History.

Alternate History Quotes

“Ms Rowanberg’s with you? Good, so you got her out? How is she? ” He didn’t realise that his flurry of eager questions were a definite tell, but the Lieutenant pretended not to notice. “Annoyed, sir.” The Lieutenant chuckled. “She was looking forward to taking out her anger on her captors, but I’m afraid we denied her that privilege. The five we got are not answering any calls now.” “Good,” James spat, and under his breath he added, “F*cking bastards.” He thought no one heard him, and he didn’t see the Lieutenant struggling not to grin. So he’s one of us after all, mused the Lieutenant.”

FearChangeSpaceCourageFutureCuriosityExploreGrippingAlternate HistoryHigh Tech
Book:First into the Fray
Create image

“Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.”

ChangeJusticeHonestyPerceptionUtopiaDifferenceDystopiaAlternate History
Book:Underground Airlines
Create image

“Sometimes I wonder who my mother might be if she weren't married to my father. Everyone around him seems that much less free-spirited, that much less open to possibility, so much more controlled. At her office she is loud and filled with infectious laugher. Here she is more quiet and deferential. I can cut a cucumber, I say more sharply than I intend. She winces and busies herself with searching for a vegetable peeler, if only to make a point.”

ChoicesAlternate History
Book:Speak No Evil
Create image

“I bet the people living in the timeline where Hillary is president are laughing at us. They’re probably sipping lattes and giggling: “Imagine if Trump had won! Can you even imagine what that clusterfuck would look like?” But even in their wildest dreams they wouldn’t come up with the unimaginable clusterfuck that our timeline is.”

Trump QuotesAlternate HistoryQuotes About TrumpAlternate RealityTrumpvirusTrump Coronavirus QuotesTrump CoronavirusTrump Coronavirus Twitter QuotesClusterfuck
Book:Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes
Create image

“That's one of our speculations, by the way. That the prior version of history that this one overwrote was horrible. Complete geopolitical mayhem; half of New York City is underwater. The United States is headed toward civil war, or ruled by an artificial-intelligence construct, or some such other thing. Real end-of-days stuff. That the instances of ourselves who existed in that history figured out what we have: that the invention of the causality violation device was the cause. That in that prior version of history, Rebecca did not die in a car accident. That she went back to the past on a mission, as a volunteer, well aware of her sacrifice.”

Science FictionTime TravelDystopianDexter PalmerAlternate HistoryVersion Control
Book:Version Control
Create image

“Aidan and Kai were almost the same height, but frequently Kai seemed smaller, even less mature. Aidan couldn't completely explain it. Certainly, Kai had suffered far less in his life. Aidan wondered how Kai would have coped with the horrors he himself had endured, and allowed himself a cold smile at the thought of the bookish Kai chained in a screwship's dark hold, squirming in his own shit.”

SlaveryHistorical FictionAlternate HistoryMetaAlternate Universe
Book:Lion's Blood
Create image

“Arthur, what does this mean?" "Mister Bogart, it means that in 10 minutes you will be sworn in as the 24th President of the United States." "I can't believe a goddamned wisdom tooth infection got Charlie," Vice President Humphrey Bogart tossed the sheet of paper his secretary brought him, "If you weren't twenty, I'd offer you this damned job." "Sir, you keep tossing the Lord around, people are gonna call you a Red.”

HumorAlternate HistoryHumphrey BogartArthur C ClarkePolitcal Comedy
Book:The National Stage: If Artists were Presidents
Create image

“Jeff had to bite his tongue, figuratively speaking, to keep from snarling that he and other military commanders had continually carped and complained to the civilian authorities that they spent too much of their time worrying about weapons and not enough worrying about the humdrum needs of military supply. Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.”

Science FictionAlternate HistoryMilitary Science Fiction
Author:Eric Flint and Robert E. Waters. 1637: The Transylvanian Decision”
Create image

“Susanna spoke of divergent paths that lead to a distant horizon, of fate and destiny and myriad potentialities for glory or doom. She spoke of facing one’s future without choice. Truly, it is not hard to fathom that at that precise instant in history something as minute as the cool February wind blowing upon my cheek from the west or the sinking of my boot in that shifting Virginia mud had the potential to change my life forever. When a bullet slices through the air towards a man he sees those phantom paths flickering in gun smoke before him. There is hope, there is chance and there is death.”

Alternate History
Book:Columbia & Britannia
Create image

“Chance – invisible, furtive, and silent – is the vast canvas upon which all the rest of war is painted. Skill, courage, ruse, character, the elements of nature, technology and all the other components of war all operate against the backdrop of chance. Again and again, chance has raised up and brought down empires, snatched laurels from one hand to throw to another, and destroyed the most finely wrought plans.”

World War IiAlternate History
Book:Disaster at D-day: The Germans Defeat the Allies,june 1944
Create image

“His touch felt like coming back, and Quincy realized she had been waiting for it. When he pulled away, both of his hands now on the sides of her face, his eyes searching hers for answers, Quincy nodded then wrapped her arms around him. She pressed her face to his chest, and his response was to gather her to him, saying something she couldn't her. And there it was, the heartbeat she had heard the night of the Fothergils' ball, pulsing again in the shell of her ear. Quincy closed her eyes from relief. It gave her the same comfort the sound of the press gave her. It was a familiar machine.”

Young AdultHistorical FictionNew AdultAlternate History
Book:The Q
Create image

“A huge fleet comprised of thousands of large naval and other seaworthy vessels from almost every nation on earth laid in wait off the coasts of the United States of America. The ships were stationary, poised and ready, positioned miles out to sea but still within plain view of every major port city, along every coastal waterway on all three sides of the great North American land mass.”

Short StoryDystopianAlternate History
Book:The Promised Land
Create image

“See Cook [op.cit.] for a discussion of Huygens’s unusual wartime visit to Cambridge and the Royal Society. His philosophical contretemps with Isaac Newton in 1675 (referenced in Society minutes as “The Great Corpuscular Debate”) would mark the last significant intellectual discourse between England and the continent prior to the chaos of the Interregnum and the Annexation . . . Some Newton biographers [Winchester (1867), &c] indicate Huygens may have used his sojourn in Cambridge to access Newton’s alchemical journals and that key insights derived thusly may have been instrumental to Huygens’s monumental breakthrough. However, cf. Hooft [1909] and references therein for a critique of the forensic alchemy underlying this assertion. From Freeman, Thomas S., A History of the Pre-Annexation England from Hastings to the Glorious Revolution, 3 Vols. New Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1918.”

Alternate HistoryIsaac NewtonHuygens
Author:Ian Tregillis
Create image

“The taxi stand was only an open shelter, so I was freezing as I looked toward midtown. I could see the RCA building with its bright red logo at Rockefeller Center, and farther south, the Empire State Building with its illuminated set-backs. At the tip of Manhattan, the twin towers of the World Trade Center -- which were over 1,100 feet tall themselves -- flanked the mile-high Space Trylon. It was clear as well as cold, and as I looked toward Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, it seemed to be poijnting to the stars. This, of course, was the idea, since it embodied the joint American-Soviet space exploration program that settled the Moon in 1955, and, twenty years later, Mars.”

SpaceAlternate History
Book:Another Girl, Another Planet
Create image