Horror authors

"The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men — were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended."

"For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay."

"On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the ​autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation."

"This stone had apparently marked the ​grave out of which the tree had sprung ages ago. The tree's exacting roots had robbed the grave and made the stone a prisoner. A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! my name in full! — the date of my birth! — the date of my death! A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red disk — no shadow darkened the trunk! A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa."

"Peyton Fahrquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."

"Haïta told him all: how thrice he had met the radiant maid, and thrice she had left him forlorn. He related minutely all that had passed between them, omitting no word of what had been said. When he had ended, the holy hermit was a moment silent, then said: "My son, I have attended to thy story, and I know the maiden. I have myself seen her, as have many. Know, then, that her name, which she would not even permit thee to inquire, is Happiness. Thou saidst the truth to her, that she is capricious for she imposeth conditions that man can not fulfill, and delinquency is punished by desertion. She cometh only when unsought, and will not be questioned. One manifestation of curiosity, one sign of doubt, one expression of misgiving, and she is away! How long didst thou have her at any time before she fled?" "Only a single instant," answered Haïta, ​blushing with shame at the confession. "Each time I drove her away in one moment." "Unfortunate youth " said the holy hermit, "but for thine indiscretion thou mightst have had her for two.""

"True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical."

"The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling."

"There are sounds that we cannot hear. At either end of the scale are notes that stir ​no chord of that imperfect instrument, the human ear. They are too high or too grave. I have observed a flock of blackbirds occupying an entire tree-top — the tops of several trees — and all in full song. Suddenly — in a moment — at absolutely the same instant all spring into the air and fly away. How? They could not all see one another—whole tree-tops intervened. At no point could a leader have been visible to all. There must have been a signal of warning or command, high and shrill above the din, but by me unheard. I have observed, too, the same simultaneous flight when all were silent, among not only blackbirds, but other birds — quail, for example, widely separated by bushes —even on opposite sides of a hill. It is known to seamen that a school of whales basking or sporting on the surface of the ocean, miles apart, with the convexity of the earth between, will sometimes dive at the same instant — all gone out of sight in a moment. The signal has been sounded — too grave for the ear of the sailor at the masthead and his comrades on the deck — who nevertheless feel its vibrations in the ship as the stones of a cathedral are stirred by the bass of the organ. As with sounds, so with colors. At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as 'actinic' rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real “chromatic scale.” I am not mad; there are colors that we cannot see. And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a color!"

"Mark how my fame rings out from zone to zone: A thousand critics shouting: "He's unknown!""

"Study Herod, madame, study Herod."

"This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier."

"An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching."

"Hidden in hollows and behind clumps of rank brambles were large tents, dimly lighted with candles, but looking comfortable. The kind of comfort they supplied was indicated by pairs of men entering and reappearing, bearing litters; by low moans from within and by long rows of dead with covered faces outside. These tents were constantly receiving the wounded, yet were never full; they were continually ejecting the dead, yet were never empty. It was as if the helpless had been carried in and murdered, that they might not hamper those whose business it was to fall to-morrow."

"I suppose the country lying between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing could boast a few inhabitants other than alligators. What manner of people they were it is impossible to say, inasmuch as the fighting dispersed, or possibly exterminated them; perhaps in merely classing them as non-saurian I shall describe them with sufficient particularity and at the same time avert from myself the natural suspicion attaching to a writer who points out to persons who do not know him the peculiarities of persons whom he does not know. One thing, however, I hope I may without offense affirm of these swamp-dwellers--they were pious. To what deity their veneration was given--whether, like the Egyptians, they worshiped the crocodile, or, like other Americans, adored themselves, I do not presume to guess. But whoever, or whatever, may have been the divinity whose ends they shaped, unto Him, or It, they had builded a temple. This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle."

"Riven and torn with cannon-shot, the trunks of the trees protruded bunches of splinters like hands, the fingers above the wound interlacing with those below."

"A kiss is but a modified bite, and a fond mother, when she rapturously avers that her babe is 'almost good enough to eat,' merely shows that she is herself only a trifle too good to eat it."

"Intolerance is natural and logical, for in every dissenting opinion lies an assumption of superior wisdom."

"Before undergoing a surgical operation arrange your temporal affairs. You may live."

"Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward a straiter resemblance to the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death, and the hope of Hell."

"Absent, adj. Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction; vilifed; hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration and affection of another."

"To men a man is but a mind. Who cares What face he carries or what form he wears? But woman's body is the woman. O, Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go, But heed the warning words the sage hath said: A woman absent is a woman dead."

"Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others."

"Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion."

"Accord, n. Harmony."

"Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."

"Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous"

"Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."

"Advice, n. The smallest current coin."

"Alone, adj. In bad company."

"Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead."

"Amnesty, n. The state’s magnaminity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish."

"Apologize, v. To lay the foundation for a future offense."

"Bacchus, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk."

"Back, n. That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity."

"Backbite, v.t. To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you."

"Barometer, n. An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having."

"Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters."

"Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen."

"Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other."

"Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think... In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office."

"Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her."

"Cabbage, n. A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head."

"Callous, adj. Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting another."

"Cannon, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries."

"Capital, n. The seat of misgovernment."

"Cartesian, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum -- whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made."

"Cat, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle."

"Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin."

"Circus, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool."

"Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead."

"Clarionet, n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet -- two clarionets."

"Clock, n.: A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him."

"Confidant, Confidante, n. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B, confided by him to C."

"Congratulation, n. The civility of envy."

"Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with others."

"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

"Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision."

"Dawn, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh."

"Decide, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set."

"Defenceless, adj. Unable to attack."

"Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work."

"Diplomacy, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country."

"Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."

"Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm."

"Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."

"Electricity, n. The cause of all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else. It is the same thing as lightning, and its famous attempt to strike Dr. Franklin is one of the most picturesque incidents in that great and good man's career."

"Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull."

"Extinction, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state."

"Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

"Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey."

"Feast, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness."

"Flesh, n. The Second Person of the secular Trinity."

"Forgetfulness, A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience."

"Freebooter, n. A conqueror in a small way of business, whose annexations lack of the sanctifying merit of magnitude."

"Freemasons, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucius, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids — always by a Freemason."

"Friendless, adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense"

"Gallows, n. A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which the leading actor is translated to heaven."

"Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own."

"Generous, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest."

"Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another."

"Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel."

"Heaven, n. A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own."

"Helpmate, n. A wife, or bitter half."

"Hers, pron. His."

"Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line."

"Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man."

"Infancy, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, 'Heaven lies about us.' The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward."

"In'ards, n. pl. The stomach, heart, soul, and other bowels."

"Insurrection, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government."

"Justice, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service."

"Kilt, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland."

"Kleptomaniac, n. A rich thief."

"Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property of B."

"Land, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist."

"Laughter, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable."

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."

"Liberty, n. One of imagination's most precious possessions."

"Liberty, n. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either."

"Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

"Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient."

"Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane."

"Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two."

"Mayonnaise, n. One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion."

"Monday, n. In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game."

"Neighbor, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient."

"Non-combatant, n. A dead Quaker."

"Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills."

"Once, adj. Enough."

"Opiate, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard."

"Opportunity, n. A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment."

"Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amok by hamstringing it."

"Optimist, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white."

"Past, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one--the knowledge and the dream."

"Overwork, n. A dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing."

"Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue."

"Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first."

"Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing."

"Pig, n. An animal (Porcus omnivorus) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig."

"Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy."

"Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."

"Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice."

"Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."

"Prejudice, n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support."

"Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated."

"Rational, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection."

"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."

"Resign, v. To renounce an honor for an advantage. To renounce an advantage for a greater advantage."

"Revelation, n. A famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing."

"Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go."

"Sabbath, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh."

"Saint, n. A dead sinner, revised and edited."

"Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based."

"Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others."

"Success, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows."

"Twice, adv. Once too often."

"Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish."

"Virtues, n. pl. Certain abstentions."

"Vote, v. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."

"White, adj. and n. Black."

"Witch, n. (1) An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil."

"Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments."

"Youth, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer."

"Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl."

"Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names."

"Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands."

"You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times a day."

"Self-denial is indulgence of a propensity to forego."

"For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it."

"To Dogmatism the Spirit of Inquiry is the same as the Spirit of Evil."

"There was never a genius who was not thought a fool until he disclosed himself; whereas he is a fool then only."

"Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style."

"To be comic is merely to be playful, but wit is a serious matter. To laugh at it is to confess that you do not understand."

"If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they."

"O proud philanthropist, your hope is vain To get by giving what you lost by gain."

"There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must."

"The game of discontent has its rules, and he who disregards them cheats. It is not permitted to you to wish to add another's advantages or possessions to your own; you are permitted only to wish to be another."

"If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it."

"When lost in a forest go always down hill. When lost in a philosophy or doctrine go upward."

"We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect."

"A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else."

"The virtues chose Modesty to be their queen. "I did not know that I was a virtue," she said. "Why did you not choose Innocence?" "Because of her ignorance," they replied. "She knows nothing but that she is a virtue.""

"The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity."

"Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps."

"The palmist looks at the wrinkles made by closing the hand and says they signify character. The philosopher reads character by what the hand most loves to close upon."

"The money-getter who pleads his love of work has a lame defense, for love of work at money-getting is a lower taste than love of money."

"A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links."

"He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity."

"Along the road of life are many pleasure resorts, but think not that by tarrying in them you will take more days to the journey. The day of your arrival is already recorded."

"The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain "—that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain"—that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him."

"Convictions are variable; to be always consistent is to be sometimes dishonest."

"The most intolerant advocate is he who is trying to convince himself."

"The poor man's price of admittance to the favor of the rich is his self-respect."

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."

"Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain."

"Happiness is lost by criticizing it; sorrow by accepting it."

"When prosperous the fool trembles for the evil that is to come; in adversity the philosopher smiles for the good that he has had."

"Age, with his eyes in the back of his head, thinks it wisdom to see the bogs through which he has floundered."

"Wisdom is known only by contrasting it with folly; by shadow only we perceive that all visible objects are not flat. Yet Philanthropos would abolish evil!"

"To the eye of failure success is an accident."

"While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide."

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

"To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."

"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral."

"Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort."

"Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye."

"Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life."

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."

"In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy."

"I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way."

"Youth is wholly experimental."

"Nothing like a little judicious levity."

"Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker."

"So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend."

"Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies."

"Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits."

"The pleasant Land of Counterpane."

"Youth now flees on feathered foot."

"Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man."

"There is but one art, to omit."

"It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about."

"He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!"

"A good conscience is eight parts of courage."

"Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea."

"We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others."

"To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill."

"It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room."

"By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week."

"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?"

"It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses."

"You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else."

"Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself - erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life."

"Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support."

"Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys."

"Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature."

"The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?"

"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish."

"There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man."

"The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life."

"I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error."

"To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage."

"Old and young, we are all on our last cruise."

"The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour."

"All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel."

"Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?"

"It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives."

"I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song of pure concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices."

"Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough."

"There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill."

"It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say."

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life."

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."

"There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life."

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life."

"A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity."

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."

"I am in the habit," replied the Prince, "of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered."

"The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing."

"People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living."

"Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?"

"A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying."

"Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?"

"A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission."

"There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions."

"Decisive actions are often taken in a moment and without any conscious deliverance from the rational parts of man."

"I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful."

"I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion."

"A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour."

"The world is a great place and stocked with wealth and beauty, and there is no limit to the rewards that may be offered. Such an one who would refuse a million of money may sell his honour for an empire or the love of a woman."

"An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man."

"Time passes quickly with lovers."

"In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence."

"To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath."

"When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things."

"When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten."

"And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations."

"Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment."

"If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!"

"The wine is bottled poetry."

"The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities."

"This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories."

"There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear."

"Sanity itself is a kind of convention."

"The imagination loves to trifle with what is not."

"It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation."

"Wherever a man is, there will be a lie."

"Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load."

"But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men."

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

"Doctors is all swabs... and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that? — and I lived on rum, I tell you."

"What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate."

"They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener."

"Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!"

"You can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad."

"We must go on, because we can't turn back."

"Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly."

"Them that die will be the lucky ones!"

"For thirty years," he said, "I’ve sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them's my views——amen, so be it."

"In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day."

"A child should always say what's true And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table; At least as far as he is able."

"Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by. Late in the night when the fires are out, Why does he gallop and gallop about?"

"I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed."

"The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart."

"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

"Children, you are very little, And your bones are very brittle."

"They were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are: being men rooted out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss together on the rough seas, with masters no less cruel."

"Each side, in these sort of civil broils, takes the name of honesty for its own."

"Am I no a bonny fighter?"

"I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first."

"I've a grand memory for forgetting, David."

"Of all my verse, like not a single line; But like my title, for it is not mine. That title from a better man I stole: Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!"

"Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!"

"Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl."

"Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair Who glory to have thrown in air, High over arm, the trembling reed, By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed."

"Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill."

"Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain"

"My body which my dungeon is, And yet my parks and palaces: — Which is so great that there I go All the day long to and fro."

"There's just ae thing I cannae bear, An' that's my conscience."

"'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.'"

"It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity."

"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name."

"It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it."

"Man is not truly one, but truly two."

"The doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure."

"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil."

"Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed."

"Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers."

"I have observed there are no persons so far away as those who are both married and estranged, so that they seem out of ear-shot or to have no common tongue."

"Thus in the best fabric of duplicity, there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all."

"It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken."

"Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian."

"Hatred betrayed is hatred impotent."

"When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war."

"There are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles."

"The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action."

"We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented."

"To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted."

"Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties."

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people."

"Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed."

"To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto."

"Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me."

"The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night."

"Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them."

"In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes."

"God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff."

"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate."

"Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home!"

"And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied."

"Ice and iron cannot be welded."

"To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement."

"The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble."

"The commonplaces are the great poetic truths."

"; instead, ."

"Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."

"The writer of modern times who seems to us most like the "simple great ones gone," Robert Louis Stevenson, owes much of his excellence to his modesty in being subject to restraint and his good sense in burdening himself with no partial doctrines to expound."

"Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain."

""True success is to labor," you said./Though you died at forty-four,/who does more than what you did?/Making pages that would live so long... islands/as treasures.../human lives as treasures../you took a deep breath,/opened your packet of cheese and fruit, curled into/the words."

"Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach."

"What do we know ... of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have."

"Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you."

"In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism."

"I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes."

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below."

"The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!"

"My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing ... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed."

"Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon."

"I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive..."

"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world."

"It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism."

"There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street."

"When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods."

"No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace."

"There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."

"Madness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial..."

"Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities."

"Mystery attracts mystery."

"Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life."

"The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely."

"One of those creatures wrote you once, ‘do not call up any that you can not put down’."

"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread."

"There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When this happens the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences."

"It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self — not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep — the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign..."

"Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne."

"I took opium but once — in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose — my physician was worn out with horror and exertion — and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again."

"Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent."

"I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand."

"I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land — or what was now a narrow point of land — fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation."

"Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?""

"There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe." As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, "Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well....""

"I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left."

"The ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands..."

"Atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they left their old peaks they took with them all signs of themselves, save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called Ngranek. ... They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek injudiciously to scale it."

"Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes."

"In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old."

"Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself."

"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods...' There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging... Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!"

"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!... Look away... Go back... Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses... That cursed, that damnable pit... Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!"

"Above the mists on Hatheg-Kla, earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places."

"May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned frensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was — my only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!"

"Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep — those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect...."

"Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments — inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told — for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space — things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings..."

"There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacum beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others."

"I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere. I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream..."

"That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within those realms again."

"Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy."

"They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica — HYPNOS."

"From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

"Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things — in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor...."

"It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful."

"The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of."

"Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams."

"My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary."

"It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see."

"The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head."

"No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone."

"What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this: the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." ... "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." ."

"They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."

"There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die..."

"That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return."

"No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:"

"The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man."

"What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as l wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell."

"I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Old Ones; "They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.""

"Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air."

"The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity. Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen."

"The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness."

"The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight."

"The brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where — God in heaven! — the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form..."

"I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives."

"Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men."

"West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night."

"Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving...."

"What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space — a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."

"Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible — though I know not in what proportion — still remains."

"To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and sanity!"

"[...] we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust."

"Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume—throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion."

"A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs."

"[...] there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror."

"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests."

"Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child. Averse to culture, strange to humankind, He never knew the pleasures of the mind. Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean, His joys were sordid, and his morals mean. Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran, From which he deem'd himself the perfect man: But want of decency his rank decreas'd, And sunk him to the level of the beast. Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth, Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth."

"The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope."

"The best critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demand perfect rhyming, and no aspirant for fame can afford to depart from a standard so universal. It is evidently the true goal of the English, as well as of the French bard; the goal from which we are but temporarily deflected during the preceding age. But exceptions should and must be made in the case of a few who have somehow absorbed the atmosphere of other days, and who long in their hearts for the stately sound of the old classic cadences. Well may their predilection for imperfect rhyming be discouraged to a limited extent, but to chain them wholly to modern rules would be barbarous. Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme."

"The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government. ...The Birth of a Nation, ... is said to furnish a remarkable insight into the methods of the Ku-Klux-Klan, that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War. The Conservative has not yet witnessed the picture in question, but he has seen both in literary and dramatic form The Clansman, that stirring, though crude and melodramatic story by Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., on which The Birth of a Nation is based, and has likewise made a close historical study of the Klu-Klux-Klan, finding as a result of his research nothing but Honour, Chivalry, and Patriotism in the activities of the Invisible Empire. The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands and restoring to the victims of political vindictiveness their natural rights. The alleged lawbreaking of the Klan was committed only by irresponsible miscreants who, after the dissolution of the Order by its Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, used its weird masks and terrifying costumes to veil their unorganised villainies. Race prejudice is a gift of Nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved."

"Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain biological fallacies which may, in a sense, be held responsible for the extent and duration of the present conflict. These fallacies, which were the foundation of pacifism and other pernicious forms of social and political radicalism, dealt with the capacity of man to evolve mentally beyond his former state of subservience to primate instinct and pugnacity, and to conduct his affairs and international or interracial relations on a basis of reason and good-will. That belief in such capability is unscientific and childishly naive, is beside the question."

"We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake."

"Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit. The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point primitive will or desire cannot be curbed. Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long — then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression."

"The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me, for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective. There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression. I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. Like the late Mr. Wilde, "I live in terror of not being misunderstood.""

"Moreover, humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible—the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. All great humorists are sad—Mark Twain was a cynic and agnostic, and wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What Is Man?" When I was younger I wrote humorous matter—satire and light verse—and was known to many as a jester and parodist. ... But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."

"It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients—or their lack—and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws. We call a thing "good" because it promotes certain petty human conditions that we happen to like—whereas it is just as sensible to assume that all humanity is a noxious pest and should be eradicated like rats or gnats for the good of the planet or of the universe. There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature—nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate—automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability. As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence. That plan is most deserving of praise which most ably fosters the creation of the objects and conditions best adapted to diminish the pain of living for those most sensitive to its depressing ravages. To expect perfect adjustment and happiness is absurdly unscientific and unphilosophical. We can seek only a more or less trivial mitigation of suffering. I believe in an aristocracy, because I deem it the only agency for the creation of those refinements which make life endurable for the human animal of high organisation."

"It is good to be a cynic—it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world—we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death—the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed."

"The undesirability of any system of rule not tempered with the quality of kindness is obvious; for "kindness" is a complex collection of various impulses, reactions and realisations highly necessary to the smooth adjustment of botched and freakish creatures like most human beings. It is a weakness basically—or, in some cases, and ostentation of secure superiority—but its net effect is desirable; hence it is, on the whole, praiseworthy. Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. Pessimism produces kindness. The disillusioned philosopher is even more tolerant than the priggish bourgeois idealist with his sentimental and extravagant notions of human dignity and destiny."

"The literature of today, with its conscientious striving toward sincerity, must necessarily contain large amounts of matter repugnant to those who hold the hypocritical nineteenth-century view of the world. It need not be vulgarly presented, but it cannot be excluded if art is to express life. That censors actually do seek to remove this legitimate and essential matter, and that they would if given greater power do even greater harm, is plainly shewn by the futile action against “Jurgen”, and the present ban on “Ulysses”, both significant contributions to contemporary art. And, ironically enough, this same censorship blandly tolerates, through legal technicalities, infinite sewers full of frankly and frivolously nasty drivel without the least pretence of aesthetic or intellectual significance."

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

"Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse."

"We must stop thinking primarily in terms of “money” and “business” - both artificial things—and begin to think increasingly in terms of the actual resources and products on which “money” and “business” are based. In terms of these, of the human beings to whom they are to be distributed, and of the cognate human values which make the accidents of life and consciousness worth enduring."

"It is needless to rehearse the utter and degrading loss of individual liberty which results from the orthodox communistic theory that society is itself an organism in which each person is merely an insignificant cell. It is not in anti-Soviet libels, but in the proud reports of Soviet leaders, that we read of the forcible transfer of whole village populations from their ancestral abodes to new locations in the Arctic, and of the arbitrary ordering of Moscow clerks to tasks of manual labour in the farms and forests of Siberia. All these things are logical outgrowths of what the Bolsheviks call their “collectivistic ideology”, and typical examples of the horrors which might fall upon us if communism were to gain a foothold here."

"Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional build-up of the utmost subtlety. The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena. Over and above everything else should tower the stark, outrageous monstrousness of the one chosen departure from Nature. The characters should react to it as real people would react to such a thing if it were suddenly to confront them in daily life; displaying the almost soul-shattering amazement which anyone would naturally display instead of the mild, tame, quickly-passed-over emotions prescribed by cheap popular convention. Even when the wonder is one to which the characters are assumed to be used, the sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the presence of such a thing must somehow be suggested by the author. . . . Atmosphere, not action, is the thing to cultivate in the wonder story. We cannot put stress on the bare events, since the unnatural extravagance of these events makes them sound hollow and absurd when thrown into too high relief. Such events, even when theoretically possible or conceivable in the future, have no counterpart or basis in existing life and human experience, hence can never form the groundwork of an adult tale. All that a marvel story can ever be, in a serious way, is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Therefore a fantastic author should see that his prime emphasis goes into subtle suggestion—the imperceptible hints and touches of selective and associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal—instead of into bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and mood-symbolism. A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis toward something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural laws."

"There are, without doubt, great possibilities in the serious exploitation of the astronomical tale; as a few semi-classics like "The War of the Worlds", "The Last and First Men", "Station X", "The Red Brain", and Clark Ashton Smith's best work prove. But the pioneers must be prepared to labour without financial return, professional recognition, or the encouragement of a reading majority whose taste has been seriously warped by the rubbish it has devoured. Fortunately sincere artistic creation is its own incentive and reward, so that despite all obstacles we need not despair of the future of a fresh literary form whose present lack of development leaves all the more room for brilliant and fruitful experimentation."

"I am Providence."

"My theological beliefs are likely to startle one who has imagined me as an orthodox adherent of the Anglican Church. My father was of that faith, and was married by its rites, yet, having been educated in my mother's distinctively Yankee family, I was early placed in the Baptist sunday school. There, however, I soon became exasperated by the literal Puritanical doctrines, and constantly shocked my preceptors by expressing scepticism of much that was taught me. It became evident that my young mind was not of a religious cast, for the much exhorted "simple faith" in miracles and the like came not to me. I was not long forced to attend the Sunday school, but read much in the Bible from sheer interest. The more I read the Scriptures, the more foreign they seemed to me. I was infinitely fonder on the Graeco-Roman mythology, and when I was eight astounded the family by declaring myself a Roman pagan. Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other. I had really adopted a sort of Pantheism, with the Roman gods as personified attributes of deity. . . . My present opinions waver betwixt Pantheism and rationalism. I am a sort of agnostic, neither affirming nor denying anything."

"Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought and speculation from his mid, he is liable to be engulfed by the very immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand. ... There is much relief from the burden of life to be derived from many sources. To the man of high animal spirits, there is the mere pleasure of being alive; the Joi de vivre, as our Gallick friends term it. To the credulous there is religion and its paradisal dreams. To the moralist, there is a certain satisfaction in right conduct. To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. To the person of cultivated taste, there are the fine arts. To the man of humour, there is the sardonic delight of spying out pretensions and incongruities of life. To the poet there is the ability and privilege to fashion a little Arcadia in his fancy, wherein he may withdraw from the sordid reality of mankind at large. In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them."

"Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries—or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me—in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate. Yes, I seem to be a decided pessimist!—But pray do not think, gentlemen, that I am utterly forlorn and misanthropick creature. ... Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me. Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men. A sense of humour has helped me to endure existence; in fact, when all else fails, I never fail to extract a sarcastic smile from the contemplation of my own empty and egotistical career!"

"Your wonderment 'what I have against religion' reminds me of your recent Vagrant essay . . . To my mind, that essay misses one point altogether. Your "agnostic" has neglected to mention the very crux of all agnosticism—namely that the Judaeo-Christian mythology is NOT TRUE. I can see that in your philosophy truth per se has so small a place, that you can scarcely realise what it is that Galpin and I are insisting upon. In your mind, MAN is the centre of everything, and his exact conformation to certain regulations of conduct HOWEVER EFFECTED, the only problem in the universe. Your world (if you will pardon my saying so) is contracted. All the mental vigour and erudition of the ages fail to disturb your complacent endorsement of empirical doctrines and purely pragmatical notions, because you voluntarily limit your horizon—excluding certain facts, and certain undeniable mental tendencies of mankind. In your eyes, man is torn between only two influences; the degrading instincts of the savage, and the temperate impulses of the philanthropist. To you, men have but two types of emotion—lovers of the self and lovers of the race. . . . You are forgetting a human impulse which, despite its restriction to a relatively small number of men, has all through history proved itself as real and as vital as hunger—as potent as thirst or greed. I need not say that I refer to that simplest yet most exalted attribute of our species—the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW. Do you realise that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear? . . . If TRUTH amounts to nothing, then we must regard the phantasma of our slumbers just as seriously as the events of our daily lives. . . . I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. I admit that I am very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me—the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation. I desire to know approximately what my life is in terms of history—human, terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; what my magnitude may be in terms of extension,—terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; and above all, what may be my manner of linkage to the general system—in what way, through what agency, and to what extent, the obvious guiding forces of creation act upon me and govern my existence. And if there be any less obvious forces, I desire to know them and their relation to me as well."

"I am only about half alive—a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However—so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life."

"As you are aware, I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity. Accordingly, I have hardly been able to experience anything which one could call real happiness; or to take as vital an interest in human affairs as can one who still retains the hallucination of a "great purpose" in the general plan of terrestrial life. ... However, I have never permitted these circumstances to react upon my daily life; for it is obvious that although I have "nothing to live for", I certainly have just as much as any other of the insignificant bacteria called human beings. I have thus been content to observe the phenomena about me with something like objective interest, and to feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom. In ceasing to care about most things, I have likewise ceased to suffer in many ways. There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth."

"I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups—(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities."

"Oh, yes ... I'm really frightfully human and love all mankind, and all that sort of thing. Mankind is truly amusing, when kept at the proper distance. And common men, if well-behaved, are really quite useful. One is a cynick only when one thinks. At such times the herd seems a bit disgusting because each member of it is always trying to hurt somebody else, or gloating because somebody else is hurt. Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life—the animalistic or (if one may use a term so polluted with homoletick associations) worldly people of our absurd civilisation. ....... I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of anybody. I am rather sorry (not outwardly but genuinely so) when disaster befalls a person—sorry because it gives the herd so much pleasure. ... The natural hatefulness and loathsomeness of the human beast may be overcome only in a few specimens of fine heredity and breeding, by a transference of interests to abstract spheres and a consequent sublimation of the universal sadistic fury. All that is good in man is artificial; and even that good is very slight and unstable, since nine out of ten non-primitive people proceed at once to capitalise their asceticism and vent their sadism by a Victorian brutality and scorn towards all those who do not emulate their pose. Puritans are probably more contemptible than primitive beasts, though neither class deserves much respect."

"One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them."

"I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous—that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn't. It makes no difference how well they mean or how cordial they are—they simply get on my nerves unless they chance to represent a peculiarly similar combination of tastes, experiences, and heritages; as, for instance, Belknap chances to do . . . Therefore it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape and scenery. Let me have normal American faces in the streets to give the aspect of home and a white man's country, and I ask no more of featherless bipeds. My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural. No one in Providence—family aside—has any especial bond of interest with me, but for that matter no one in Cambridge or anywhere else has, either. The question is that of which roofs and chimneys and doorways and trees and street vistas I love the best; which hills and woods, which roads and meadows, which farmhouses and views of distant white steeples in green valleys. I am always an outsider—to all scenes and all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence—but as I review the new impressions which have impinged upon me since birth, I think the greatest single emotion—and the most permanent one as concerns consequences to my inner life and imagination—I have ever experienced was my first sight of Marblehead in the golden glamour of late afternoon under the snow on December 17, 1922. That thrill has lasted as nothing else has—a visible climax and symbol of the lifelong mysterious tie which binds my soul to ancient things and ancient places."

"Personally, I feel more irritated by a challenge to an accepted scientific theory than I do by an act of so-called "evil" or "injustice" among mankind; although I never allow my irritation to hamper my acceptance of the new theory as soon as positive evidence warrants it. Thus I have reluctantly exchanged the old nebular for the planetesimal hypothesis, and am beginning to accept the main points of relativity despite a profound intellectual distaste. What is, is—and our emotions regarding the cosmos and its phenomena are of no significance whatever, being wholly subjective matters dependent on individual accidents of neural and glandular physiology and of experience and environment."

"About my own attitude toward ethics—I thought I made it plain that I object only to (a) grotesquely disproportionate indignations and enthusiasms, (b) illogical extremes involving a reductio ad absurdum, and (c) the nonsensical notion that "right" and "wrong" involve any principles more mystical and universal than those of immediate expedience (with the individual's own comfort as a criterion) on the other hand. I believe I was careful to specify that I do not advocate vice and crime, but that on the other hand I have a marked distaste for immoral and unlawful acts which contravene the harmonious traditions and standards of beautiful living developed by a culture during its long history. This, however, is not ethics but aesthetics—a distinction which you are almost alone in considering negligible. ... So far as I am concerned—I am an aesthete devoted to harmony, and to the extraction of the maximum possible pleasure from life. I find by experience that my chief pleasure is in symbolic identification with the landscape and tradition-stream to which I belong—hence I follow the ancient, simple New England ways of living, and observe the principles of honour expected of a descendant of English gentlemen. It is pride and beauty-sense, plus the automatic instincts of generations trained in certain conduct-patterns, which determine my conduct from day to day. But this is not ethics, because the same compulsions and preferences apply, with me, to things wholly outside the ethical zone. For example, I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing—it is all a matter of harmony and good taste—whereas the ethical or "righteous" man would be horrified by dishonesty yet tolerant of course personal ways. If I were farming in your district I certainly would assist my neighbours—both as a means of promoting my standing in the community, and because it is good taste to be generous and accommodating. Likewise with the matter of treating the pupils in a school class. But this would not be through any sense of inner compulsion based on principles dissociated from my personal welfare and from the principle of beauty. It would be for the same reason that I would not dress eccentrically or use vulgar language. Pure aesthetics, aside from the personal-benefit element; and concerned with emotions of pleasure versus disgust rather than of approval versus indignation."

"I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government—but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. Surely you can see the profound and abysmal difference between this emotional attitude and the attitude of the democratic reformer who becomes wildly excited over the "wrongs of the masses". This reformer has uppermost in his mind the welfare of those masses themselves—he feels with them, takes up a mental-emotional point of view as one of them, regards their advancement as his prime objective independently of anything else, and would willingly sacrifice the finest fruits of the civilisation for the sake of stuffing their bellies and giving them two cinema shows instead of one per day. I, on the other hand, don't give a hang about the masses except so far as I think deliberate cruelty is coarse and unaesthetic—be it towards horses, oxen, undeveloped men, dogs, negroes, or poultry. All that I care about is the civilisation—the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men. Any indignation I may feel in the whole matter is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses. Do you not see the antipodal difference between the two positions? Both the reformer and I may unite in opposing an unworkably arrogant piece of legislation, but the motivating reasons will be absolutely antithetical. He wants to give the crowd as much as can be given them without wrecking all semblance of civilisation, whereas I want to give them only as much as can be given them without even slightly impairing the level of national culture. ... He works for as democratic a government as possible; I for as aristocratic a one as possible. But both recognise the limitations of possibility."

"good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself."

"I am no less impressed than you by the magnitude, complexity and essential beauty of the cosmos; nor am I less sensible to the veil which separates us from the grasping of ultimate reality. The great difference between us in these matters is that you like to colour your philosophical-scientific speculations with your aesthetic feelings; whilst I feel a great cleavage betwixt emotion and perceptive analysis, and never try to mix the two. Emotionally I stand breathless at the awe and loveliness and mystery of space with its ordered suns and worlds. In that mood I endorse religion, and people the fields and streams and groves with the Grecian deities and local spirits of old—for at heart I am a pantheistic pagan of the old tradition which Christianity has never reached. But when I start thinking I throw off emotion as excess baggage, and settle down to the prosaic and exact task of seeing simply what is, or probably is, and what isn't, or probably isn't. I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time."

"It delights me even more, though, to hear that my nameless cosmic monsters have an air of originality about them! Shapeless, unheard-of creatures are not original with me; for although Poe did not use them, they figure quite widely in minor horror-writing since his time. Usually they tend to be exaggerations of certain known life-forms such as insects, poisonous plants, protozoa, & the like, although a few writers break away wholly from terrestrial analogy & depict things as abstractly cosmic as luminous protoplasmic globes. If I have gone beyond these, it is only subtly & atmospherically—in details, & in occasional imputations of geometrical, biological, & physico-chemical properties definitely outside the realm of matter as understood by us. Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic—the abnormally chromatic entity in The Colour Out of Space being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in."

"In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror—indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. Dunsany, indeed, has said exquisitely almost everything I could possibly wish to say; so that when I indulge in sheer phantasy I can do no more than imitate him. Thus horror alone is left as my peculiar kingdom, & in it I must hold my lowly reproduction of a Plutonian court."

"My conception of phantasy, as a genuine art-form, is an extension rather than a negation of reality. Ordinary tales about a castle ghost or old-fashioned werewolf are merely so much junk. The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness. This curiosity and sense of awe, I believe, are quite basic among the sensitive minority in question; and I see no reason to think that they will decline in the future—for as you point out, the frontier of the unknown can never do more than scratch the surface of eternally unknowable infinity. But the truly sensitive will never be more than a minority, because most persons—even those of the keenest possible intellect and aesthetic ability—simply have not the psychological equipment or adjustment to feel that way. I have taken pains to sound various persons as to their capacity to feel profoundly regarding the cosmos and the disturbing and fascinating quality of the extra-terrestrial and perpetually unknown; and my results reveal a surprisingly small quota. In literature we can easily see the cosmic quality in Poe, Maturin, Dunsany, de la Mare, and Blackwood, but I profoundly suspect the cosmicism of Bierce, James, and even Machen. It is not every macabre writer who feels poignantly and almost intolerably the pressure of cryptic and unbounded outer space."

"I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones."

"There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life."

"As for New England as a seat of weirdness—a little historic reflection will show why it is more naturally redolent of the bizarre & the sinister than any other part of America. It was here that the most gloomy-minded of all the colonists settled; & here that the dark moods & cryptic hills pressed closest. An abnormal Puritan psychology led to all kinds of repression, furtiveness, & grotesque hidden crime, while the long winters & backwoods isolation fostered monstrous secrets which never came to light. To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred? Rhode Island does not share these tenedencies—its history & settlement being different from those of other parts of New England—but just across the line in the old Bay State the macabre broods at its strongest."

"All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist."

"I never take offence at any genuine effort to wrest the truth or deduce a rational set of values from the confused phenomena of the external world. It never occurs to me to look for personal factors in the age-long battle for truth. I assume that all hands are really trying to achieve the same main object—the discovery of sound facts and the rejection of fallacies—and it strikes me as only a minor matter that different strivers may happen to see a different perspective now and then. And in matters of mere preference, as distinguished from those involving the question of truth versus fallacy, I do not see any ground whatever for acrimonious feeling. Knowing the capriciousness and complexity of the various biological and psychological factors determining likes, dislikes, interests, indifferences, and so on, one can only be astonished that any two persons have even approximately similar tastes. To resent another's different likes and interests is the summit of illogical absurdity. It is very easy to distinguish a sincere, impersonal difference of opinion and tastes from the arbitrary, ill-motivated, and irrational belittlement which springs from a hostile desire to push another down and which constitutes real offensiveness. I have no tolerance for such real offensiveness—but I greatly enjoy debating questions of truth and value with persons as sincere and devoid of malice as I am. Such debate is really a highly valuable—almost indispensable—ingredient of life; because it enables us to test our own opinions and amend them if we find them in any way erroneous or unjustified."

"We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task. . . . The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive. . . . In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few. . . . What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American"!"

"I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla. The feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is probably little if any inferior in total quality. To expect it to remain perpetually in the background in a realistic state of society is futile—despite the most feverish efforts of Nazis and Fascisti. However—it will be some time before women are sufficiently freed from past influences to form an active factor in national life. By the time they do gain influence, they will have lost many of the emotional characteristics which now impair their powers of judgment. Many qualities commonly regarded as innate—in races, classes, and sexes alike—are in reality results of habitual and imperceptible conditioning."

"Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question—he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates . . . Equally inferior—& perhaps even more so—is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro . . . In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it white, Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take—& that is to prevent admixture as completely & determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour-line & the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line. I am in accord with the most vehement & vociferous Alabaman or Mississippian on that point ... Other racial questions are wholly different in nature—involving wide variations unconnected with superiority or inferiority. Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world—an "inferior" of any sort . . . & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences—& even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer's physical aspect froms a constant reminder of his outside origin. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the color-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically. . . . As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race-differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without telling him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception. If they were wise in their campaign to get rid of Jewish cultural influences (& a great deal can be said for such a campaign, when the dominance of the Aryan tradition is threatened as in Germany & New York City), they would not emphasize the separatism of the Jew but would strive to make him give up his separate culture & lose himself in the German people. It wouldn't hurt Germany—or alter its essential physical type—to take in all the Jews it now has. (However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.)"

"It is well to avoid actually recognized myths such as vampirism, reincarnation, etc., and invent one’s own obscure violations of cosmic law. What common myth, for example, does Blackwood use in The Willows? Or Chambers in "The Yellow Sign"? Or Hodgson in The House on the Borderland? These writers create a sort of distinctive awe of their own and manage to say something fresh despite all that has been said before."

"The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind—yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. ... The whole basis of religion is a symbolic emotionalism which modern knowledge has rendered meaningless & even unhealthy. Today we know that the cosmos is simply a flux of purposeless rearrangement amidst which man is a wholly negligible incident or accident. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, or why we should wish it otherwise. All the florid romancing about man's "dignity", "immortality", &c. &c. is simply egotistical delusions plus primitive ignorance. So, too, are the infantile concepts of "sin" or cosmic "right" & "wrong". Actually, organic life on our planet is simply a momentary spark of no importance or meaning whatsoever. Man matters to nobody except himself. Nor are his "noble" imaginative concepts any proof of the objective reality of the things they visualise. Psychologists understand how these concepts are built up out of fragments of experience, instinct, & misapprehension. Man is essentially a machine of a very complex sort, as La Mettrie recognised nearly 2 centuries ago. He arises through certain typical chemical & physical reactions, & his members gradually break down into their constituent parts & vanish from existence. The idea of personal "immortality" is merely the dream of a child or savage. However, there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social in such a realistic view of things. Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities. It has a fortuitous jumble of reactions, some of which it instinctively seeks to heighten & prolong, & some of which it instinctively seeks to shorten or lessen. Also, we see that certain courses of action tend to increase its radius of comprehension & degree of specialised organisation (things usually promoting the wished-for reactions, & in general removing the species from a clod-like, unorganised state), while other courses of action tend to exert an opposite effect. Now since man means nothing to the cosmos, it is plan that his only logical goal (a goal whose sole reference is to himself) is simply the achievement of a reasonable equilibrium which shall enhance his likelihood of experiencing the sort of reactions he wishes, & which shall help along his natural impulse to increase his differentiation from unorganised force & matter. This goal can be reached only through teaching individual men how best to keep out of each other's way, & how best to reconcile the various conflicting instincts which a haphazard cosmic drift has placed within the breast of the same person. Here, then, is a practical & imperative system of ethics, resting on the firmest possible foundation & being essentially that taught by Epicurus & Lucretius. It has no need of supernatualism, & indeed has nothing to do with it."

"I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression—and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past. They had been using science while I had been using romantic antiquarianism. At last I began to recognise something of the way in which capitalism works—always piling up concentrated wealth and impoverishing the bulk of the population until the strain becomes so intolerable as to force artificial reform."

"As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

"[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system . . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY."

"As for the general idea of what one would do if certain of death in an hour—I fancy most persons in normal health tend to sentimentalise and romanticise a bit about it. For my part—as a realist beyond the age of theatricalism and naive beliefs—I feel quite certain that my own known last hour would be spent quite prosaically in writing instructions for the disposition of certain books, manuscripts, heirlooms, and other possessions. Such a task would—in view of the mental stress—take at least an hour—and it would be the most useful thing I could do before dropping off into oblivion. If I did finish ahead of time, I'd probably spend the residual minutes getting a last look at something closely associated with my earliest memories—a picture, a library table, an 1895 Farmer's Almanack, a small music-box I used to play with at 2 ½, or some kindred symbol—completing a psychological circle in a spirit half of humour and half of whimsical sentimentality. Then—nothingness, as before Aug. 20, 1890."

"I am probably the least sensuous of all living beings; being almost exclusively visual and quasi-abstract in imagination, and tending to view and enjoy all things as a passive, detached, and sometimes remote spectator. Those arts which appeal most to the ideational imagination—the sense of drama, pageantry, historic flux, collective organisation, or escape from the natural limitations of time, space, and natural law—are undoubtedly those which appeal chiefly to me. Even my strong love of architectural and decorative beauty is probably largely dependent upon the historical bearings of the forms and motifs in which I delight. I am not wholly insensible to abstract form, but seem to relish the associative element in art more instantly and acutely than the lyrical or mathematical element . . . I don't really revel in anything unless it reminds me of something else either real or visionary—unless it opens up visual avenues of linked pseudo-recollections leading to sensations of ego-expansion and liberation . . . usually bringing in the element of time, somehow based on the past, and harbouring hints of an elusive, intangible kind of adventurous expectancy."

"I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today ... & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well .... I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ... except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all."

"In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!"

"I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity."

"Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. Yet I can assure you that this point of view is joined to one of the plainest, naivest, and most unobtrusively old-fashioned of personalities—a retiring old hermit and ascetic who does not even know what your contemporary round of activities and "parties" is like, and who during the coming winter will probably not address two consecutive sentences to any living person—tradesmen apart—save a pair of elderly aunts! Some people—a very few, perhaps—are naturally cosmic in outlook, just as others are naturally 'of and for the earth'. I am myself less exclusively cosmic than Klarkash-Ton and Wandrei. . . I begin with the individual and the soil and think outward—appreciating the sensation of spatial and temporal liberation only when I can scale it against the known terrestrial scene. They, on the other hand, are able to think of wholly non-human abysses of ultimate space—without reference-points—as realities neither irrelevant nor less significant than immediate human life. With me, the very quality of being cosmically sensitive breeds an exaggerated attachment to the familiar and the immediate—Old Providence, the woods and hills, the ancient ways and thoughts of New England—whilst with them it seems to have the opposite effect of alienating them from immediate anchorages. They despise the immediate as trivial; I know that it is trivial, but cherish rather than despise it—because everything, including infinity itself, is trivial. In reality I am the profoundest cynic of them all, for I recognize no absolute values whatever."

"I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide—the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality. These reasons are strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory—impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future. Just what those delights and freedoms are, or even what they approximately resemble, I could not concretely imagine to save my life; save that they seem to concern some ethereal quality of indefinite expansion and mobility, and of a heightened perception which shall make all forms and combinations of beauty simultaneously visible to me, and realisable by me. I might add, though, that they invariably imply a total defeat of the laws of time, space, matter, and energy—or rather, an individual independence of these laws on my part, whereby I can sail through the varied universes of space-time as an invisible vapour might ... upsetting none of them, yet superior to their limitations and local forms of material organisation. ... Now this all sounds damn foolish to anybody else—and very justly so. There is no reason why it should sound anything except damn foolish to anyone who had not happened to receive precisely the same series of inclinations, impressions, and background-images which the purely fortuitous circumstances of my own especial life have chanced to give me."

"It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur"—although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony—or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do—though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!"

"Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry — God Save The King! I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Vikinga berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares — aye — I speak truly — for was I not born with yellow hair and blue eyes."

"It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging . . . There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions . . . It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable . . . The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity . . . Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations . . . get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness."

"I really agree that Yog-Sothoth is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached serious literature yet. But I consider the use of actual folk-myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in the former one is forced to retain many blatant peurilities & contradictions of experienced which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation . . . But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitations regarding the sense of outsideness. I refer to the aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast & provocative abyss of the unknown. This has always been the chief emotion in my psychology; & whilst it obviously figures less in the psychology of the majority, it is clearly a well-defined & permanent factor from which very few sensitive persons are wholly free. . . . Reason as we may, we cannot destroy a normal perception of the highly limited & fragmentary nature of our visible world of perception & experience as scaled against the outside abyss of unthinkable galaxies & unplumbed dimensions—an abyss wherein our solar system is the merest dot . . . The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?"

"All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me . . . I have no use for the machine age or any of its conceptions, methods, & ideals. I have use only for abstract cognition without social or utilitarian connotations; the thing which Thales & Anaxagoras & Heraclitus went after, & which was clearly definable by the word philosophy until those pragmatical puffballs Socrates & Plato threw a monkey-wrench into the works & crippled human thought for the next two millennia. Now it is a matter of perfect indifference to me whether or not baser interests cluster round the search for truth & lick the molasses-drops that ooze out of the fact-barrel. This apelike parasitism of the herd means nothing either for or against the abstract is-or-isn't quest which Thales began, Democritus continued, & Einstein prolongs. If machine-culture chooses to worship "science", that's its own business. It doesn't imply that the abstract process of cognition-craving turns about & reciprocally worships machine-culture! . . . Cognition, as such, is completely without social or aesthetic implications except so far as it places certain obvious contradictions of natural laws, & certain pointless exaltations of empty trivialities, in a light so unfavourable as to encourage obsolescence. It is nobody's tool or handmaiden—it is itself alone. Practically speaking, the mind likely to worship pure cognition most sincerely is that most of all opposed to industrialism & standardisation. Cognition is that branch of human desire & celebration most antipodally removed from anything envisaged or wished by Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, & the late Charles P. Steinmetz. It is the enemy of urban civilisation as it is the enemy of all handicaps which cripple the free individualistic excursions of the disinterested intellect into unknown cosmic space. It is the sworn ally of beauty because it is itself one of the supreme forms of beauty—the catharsis of a primal, titanic urge which links man to the uttermost gulfs of dramatic immensity. It is one with the greatest music & the loftiest poetry—being perhaps a glimpse of the liberating & expanding reality which both are blindly seeking."

"As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict . . . In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable . . . Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence. . . . There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary. . . . In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent . . . If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life . . . For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life & remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it, hence (in the last few years) make allowances for it, & do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c. &c. so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them, or enter warmly & subjectively into all phases of their aesthetic expression."

"You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion . . . For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days . . . He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity . . . the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space . . . If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires."

"Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals — for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding. We advocate the preservation of conditions favourable to the growth of beautiful things — imposing palaces, beautiful cities, elegant literature, resposeful art and music, and a physically select human type such as only luxury and a pure racial strain can produce. Thus we oppose democracy, if only because it would retard the development of a handsome Nordic breed. We realise that all conceptions of justice and ethics are mere prejudices and illusions — there is no earthly reason why the masses should not be kept down for the benefit of the strong, since every man is for himself in the last analysis."

"Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. What does the condition of the rabble matter? All we need do is to keep it as quiet as we can. What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. "Equality" is a joke — but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality. If it is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled town, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields — these are all there is of life: take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take them away and our poets have nothing to sing — our dreamers have nothing to dream about. The blood of a million men is well shed in producing one glorious legend which thrills posterity and it is not at all important why it was shed."

"I am Providence, and Providence is myself—together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!"

"Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is—both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology—of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy."

"No one thinks or feels or appreciates or lives a mental-emotional-imaginative life at all, except in terms of the artificial reference-points supply'd him by the enveloping body of race-tradition and heritage into which he is born. We form an emotionally realisable picture of the external world, and an emotionally endurable set of illusions as to values and directions in existence, solely and exclusively through the arbitrary concepts and folkways bequeathed to us through our traditional culture-stream. Without this stream around us we are absolutely adrift in a meaningless and irrelevant chaos which has not the least capacity to give us any satisfaction apart from the trifling animal ones . . . Without our nationality—that is, our culture-grouping—we are merely wretched nuclei of agony and bewilderment in the midst of alien and directionless emptiness . . . We have an Aryan heritage, a Western-European heritage, a Teutonic-Celtic heritage, an Anglo-Saxon or English heritage, an Anglo-American heritage, and so on—but we can't detach one layer from another without serious loss—loss of a sense of significance and orientation in the world. America without England is absolutely meaningless to a civilised man of any generation yet grown to maturity. The breaking of the saving tie is leaving these colonies free to build up a repulsive new culture of money, speed, quantity, novelty, and industrial slavery, but that future culture is not ours, and has no meaning for us . . . Possibly the youngest generation already born and mentally active—boys of ten to fifteen—will tend to belong to it, as indeed a widespread shift in their tastes and instincts and loyalties would seem to indicate. But to say all this has anything to do with us is a joke! These boys are the Bedes and Almins of a new, encroaching, and apparently inferior culture. We are the Boëthii and Symmachi and Cassiodori of an older and perhaps dying culture. It is to our interest to keep our own culture alive as long as we can—and if possible to reserve and defend certain areas against the onslaughts of the enemy."

"It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever."

"No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellectation. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment. What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this—that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don't despise the French in France or Quebec, but we don't want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River. The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream—this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race—is to obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists."

"Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists—eminent Europeans for whom the prejudice-problem does not exist. But, it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man's equal. For the simple fact is, that two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness. No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses. A normal Yankee feels like a fish out of water in a crowd of cultivated Japanese, even though they may be his mental and aesthetic superiors; and the normal Jap feels the same way in a crowd of Yankees. This, of course, implies permanent association. We can all visit exotic scenes and like it—and when we are young and unsophisticated we usually think we might continue to like it as a regular thing. But as years pass, the need of old things and usual influences—home faces and home voices—grows stronger and stronger; and we come to see that mongrelism won't work. We require the environing influence of a set of ways and physical types like our own, and will sacrifice anything to get them. Nothing means anything, in the end, except with reference to that continuous immediate fabric of appearances and experiences of which one was originally part; and if we find ourselves ingulphed by alien and clashing influences, we instinctively fight against them in pursuit of the dominant freeman's average quota of legitimate contentment. . . . All that any living man normally wants—and all that any man worth calling such will stand for—is as stable and pure a perpetuation as possible of the set of forms and appearances to which his value-perceptions are, from the circumstances of moulding, instinctively attuned. That is all there is to life—the preservation of a framework which will render the experience of the individual apparently relevant and significant, and therefore reasonably satisfying. Here we have the normal phenomenon of race-prejudice in a nutshell—the legitimate fight of every virile personality to live in a world where life shall seem to mean something. . . . Just how the black and his tan penumbra can ultimately be adjusted to the American fabric, yet remains to be seen. It is possible that the economic dictatorship of the future can work out a diplomatic plan of separate allocation whereby the blacks may follow a self-contained life of their own, avoiding the keenest hardships of inferiority through a reduced number of points of contact with the whites . . . No one wishes them any intrinsic harm, and all would rejoice if a way were found to ameliorate such difficulties as they have without imperilling the structure of the dominant fabric. It is a fact, however, that sentimentalists exaggerate the woes of the average negro. Millions of them would be perfectly content with servile status if good physical treatment and amusement could be assured them, and they may yet form a well-managed agricultural peasantry. The real problem is the quadroon and octoroon—and still lighter shades. Theirs is a sorry tragedy, but they will have to find a special place. What we can do is to discourage the increase of their numbers by placing the highest possible penalties on miscegenation, and arousing as much public sentiment as possible against lax customs and attitudes—especially in the inland South—at present favouring the melancholy and disgusting phenomenon. All told, I think the modern American is pretty well on his guard, at last, against racial and cultural mongrelism. There will be much deterioration, but the Nordic has a fighting chance of coming out on top in the end."

"When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. I know that these natural phenomena are more important & significant than the special & tenuous moods which so absorb me, & that an art based on them is greater than any which fantasy could evoke—but I'm simply not big enough to react to them in the sensitive way necessary for artistic response & literary use. God in heaven! I'd certainly be glad enough to be a Shakespeare or Balzac or Turgeniev if I could! . . . I respect realism more than any other form of art—but must reluctantly concede that, through my own limitations, it does not form a medium which I can adequately use."

"However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order . . . defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law . . . are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law . . . especially the laws of time. . . . Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is."

"I endorse all that you say of the superior intelligence of the felidae. Never have I been able to associate the docile servility and satellitism of the canidae with mental power. Zoölogists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50—but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers—the aristocratic, epicurean philosopher who knows what he wants and tells interlopers to go to hell. There is no credit in having a dog attached to one—for a dog can be conditioned to become anybody's slave and property. But a cat is nobody's slave. You do not own a cat. If one lives in your home, it is because he regards your way of life favourably, and accepts you as a friend, as one gentleman accepts another. He takes no kicks or insolence from anyone. If you are not worthy to associate with him, he will depart to seek an environment more suited to a gentleman's taste. Therefore he who retains the respect and companionship of a feline has proven himself to be essentially a superior citizen. For a human being, membership in the Kappa Alpha Tau forms a badge of distinction. Many are the eminent names on that member ship list—Mahomet himself, Richelieu, Poe, Baudelaire. . . one could catalogue them endlessly. Certainly, I ask no greater honour than to be accounted a citizen of Ulthar beyond the River Skai!"

"It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination....The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence...."

"All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again."

"Lovecraft's Antarctica is the most truly terrible of all his landscapes. This bleak realm of ice and death, the place where came "both mist and snow" to the Ancient Mariner, is at once a heightened version of the real Antarctic; and a vision of the abhorrent plateau of Leng, the roof of the world; and the labyrinthine city of the Elder Beings. It is a symphonic structure of landscaping. According to de Quincy, Coleridge, before starting "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," has planned "a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream scenery with external things and connected with the imagery of high latitudes." To some similar plan, Lovecraft brought his own fears; he had a horror of, and an allergy to, any temperature lower than twenty degrees and, frequently, in later life, below thirty degrees."

"He's incredibly imaginative. But also, the thing I've found, looking at his work, is that he's primarily a science fiction writer. And all the science stuff that's in his stories is fairly accurate - he did a lot of research. For example, in From Beyond, he did a lot of research into the pineal gland; in Reanimator, he almost gives you the formula for bringing the dead back to life. I think he was very interested in how things actually worked."

"In his books Lovecraft created a brilliantly conceived alternative pre-history of the Earth, built around alien gods of unremitting evil, buried in cities built according to the perverted rules of non-Euclidean geometry and still worshipped by individuals who see through the cant of contemporary morality and perceive the darkness at the heart of our wantonly unjust universe. You can see why he'd appeal to the French."

"H.P Lovecraft hints at the existence of non-human beings that tread the deeps of space between the stars."

"(talking about nerddom) H. P. Lovecraft exemplifies this fascination like no other, and the fandom for him is well-justified. It just goes to show how many people he influenced, from Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King. However, Lovecraft cannot be read at all without criticism. Criticism of him, criticism of the racist WASP culture of New England, criticism of bourgeois literature and its tendency to exclude new voices. Lovecraft was a perpetrator and a victim."

"H. P. Lovecraft-that very, very racist writer"

"I like imagining that Lovecraft is spinning in his grave as he's forced to view the world through the eyes of his statuettes placed in the homes and offices of the likes of Nnedimma Okorafor, Kinuko Y. Craft, S. P. Somtow, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and me."

"H.P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue. [...] Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy [...] the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person — if he were alive today, he'd likely exist most vibrantly in various Internet chatrooms. Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others — particularly listening, picking up accepts, rhythms, dialect and slang of various groups. Loners like Lovecraft often write it badly, or with the care of someone who is composing in a language other than his or her native tongue."

"Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me."

"Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious. Seldom in his life and never in his writing did he try to fight back, to summon up a shred of coherent reasoning, a scrap of authentic prose, as a bulwark against the terrors and compulsions that tyrannized his mind. But Lovecraft's feebleness gave his writing its one strength: his tales can be frightening."

"Lovecraft's narrative is not only modern, it also emerged from an imagination that was deferential to no dogma that may be dated, one that assimilated what had come before and envisioned what might come to be in the evolution of human consciousness, deliberating with a fearsome honesty until it settled on a position it could hold in good faith and was ready to jettison as dictated by evidence or cerebration. Lovecraft drew upon and extended the most advanced thought of his time as well as all previous scientific and philosophical developments that tended to disenchant the human species with itself. In that sense, he really went the limit of disillusionment in assuming the meaningless, disordered, foundationless universe that became the starting point for later figures in science and philosophy....Although Lovecraft did have his earthbound illusions, at the end of the day he existed in no man's land of nihilism and disillusionment. As a fiction writer, he will ever be a contemporary of each new generation of mortals..."

"Lovecraft's writing is a kind of purple poetry, notoriously parody-able. Of course such language can be done badly, and is not a necessary corollary of Weird Fiction (see, for example, the more robust register of Hodgson in many of his short stories, or Blackwood's melancholy ruminations). However, at its best Lovecraft's (and others') writing achieves affect because of, not despite, its prose, a crime against a certain au courant middlebrow minimalism , that will in passing extol barer prose as "spare", as if logo-parsimoniousness were a self-evident virtue ; or, even more absurdly, as "precise", as if the word " table " is somehow more like a table than a prolix descriptive alternative."

"I'd first read Lovecraft when I was a young adolescent, which is perhaps the best time to read Lovecraft. Now, I admire him for his style, his monomaniacal precision, the 'weirdness' of his imagination, and the underlying, intransigent tragic vision that informs all of his work. He's an American original, whose influences on subsequent writers in the field (Stephen King, for instance) is all-pervasive."

"The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft. Preposterous, overblown, absurd in every way — yet with an originality that looks more powerful and convincing each time I dip into it."

"The view that human relations exist only as engulfment is a serious limitation on a narrative artist. Toward the end of his life Lovecraft seems to have been unhappily aware of this; unfortunately he also underrated his own work and died before it began to be popular. His originality and his undoubted talent (the eerily parodic autobiography of "The Outsider," details like the "gelatinous" voice in "Randolph Carter" or "a warmth that may have been sardonic" of Innsmouth) is best at its quietest, worst in its bravely direct but often inadequate attacks on a theme that requires (at the very least) poetic genius. The very rarity of literary treatments of Lovecraft's main theme give his work added interest, however, and his work will probably always appeal to readers who find his theme compelling. If he had not died young, he might have moved beyond the kind of horror story that says This is what it feels like to the kind that adds And this is what is really happening. The latter moves into tragedy and implied social criticism (as does, for example, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House). Lovecraft concludes "the spectral in literature ... is ... a narrow though essential branch of human expression" (p. 106), a comment that might well describe his work: narrow, not appealing to wide tastes and even considerably flawed, yet authentic, and by those who find it congenial, securely loved."

"I am profoundly saddened by the news of H. P. Lovecraft's death after a month of painful illness. The loss seems an intolerable one, and I am sure that it will be felt deeply and permanently by the whole weird fiction public. Most of all will it be felt by the myriad friends who knew Lovecraft through face-to-face meeting or correspondence: for in his case the highest literary genius was allied to the most brilliant and most endearing personal qualities."

"I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book [i.e., The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1961)] was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously: that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse and had about an element of ressentiment, a kind of desire to take revenge on a world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy."

"I suppose what makes Lovecraft both good and bad is the fact that he was an obsessed writer. And this is also the reason that so few of the works in the Lovecraft tradition have touched the same level of imaginative power. August Derleth or Robert Bloch can capture the Arkham atmosphere and style excellently, but it doesn't express their true centre of gravity as writers. [...] This explains why Lovecraft has remained unique, in spite of the number of writers who have been fascinated by his mythical world and by his style. He created the Cthulhu Mythos out of inner necessity."

"I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did.""

"I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television."

"It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one."

"Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time — for me, at least — to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping."

"How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me."

"The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

"I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public."

"All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss."

"If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world."

"Going to spring break at Ft. Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress."

"The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything."

"The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast."

"The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead."

"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line, and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power."

"These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics."

"We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics."

"No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline"

"No detail is too minor to note."

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood."

"There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper."

"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."

"When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy them, but now they call this free will. At least the Greeks were being honest."

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up."

"In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant. They want you to believe that the new and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you."

"You don't become a journalist because you're good at keeping secrets. Being a Journalist is about telling. It's about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media. The Culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. In the past, nobody worried too much about sex with strangers. Or before that, bites from fleas. Or untreated drinking water. Mosquitoes. Asbestos."

"Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable."

"Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride. She said, "Even absolute corruption has its perks."

"Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain. And she says, 'Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?'"

"These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.""

"Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell."

"Here's Big Brother, singing and dancing, force-feeding you, so your mind never goes hungry enough to think."

"Until you deal with your real personal issues, you'll never be able to control yourself."

"Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf."

"When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says."Johnny Apple seed was a fucking biological terrorist."

"The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.""

"Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job."

"According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy."

"Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.""

"Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole."

"Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. .... Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story? .... You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?"

"The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most passive person is actually an aggressor. Every day, just you living means the misery and death of plants and animals- and even some people. "Slaughterhouses, factory farms, sweatshops," she says, "like it or not, that's what your money buys.""

"In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause."

"Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro."

"Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do."

"History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse."

"I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear."

"The more people die, the more things stay the same."

"Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away."

"Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies."

"Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine."

"This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed."

""The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch."

"Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie."

"If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus."

"The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it. What’s funny is, you’d be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world. It’s hard to call any of my novels “fiction.”"

"All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they're always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what's about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there's those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century's equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive."

"Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away."

"People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party...As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do."

"To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole."

""It's not a matter of right and wrong," Mr. Whittier would say. Really, there is no wrong. Not in our minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take--what you do or say or how you choose to appear--is automatically right the moment you act."

"What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control of the game. It's the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow is a first definite step down some road."

"Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor."

"A journalist has a right... ...and a duty, to destroy the golden calves he helps create."

"You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever."

"The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth. Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes round. We're the rocks. And what happens to us--the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse--why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright."

"In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering. It was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process."

"Every apostle or disciple," Mrs. Clarke says, "as much as they're running to follow their savior-they're running just as hard to escape something else."

"For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die."

"You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle."

"This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat."

"As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'"

""Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you." p205"

""What matters," Sister Vigilante says, "is, people need a monster they can believe in." A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us."

"With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved."

"I lost my virginity through my ear."

"The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look."

"We should forgive God..."

"Chapter 19, Absolution"

"That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed."

"If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more."

"We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one."

"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences."

""I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76"

""The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

"People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves."

"Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288"

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don't recognize as real."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport."

"That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell."

"Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile."

"Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be."

"Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world."

"You will always have some excuse not to live your life."

"Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour."

"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven."

"If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU."

"It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life."

"In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."

"Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism."

"If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.""

"I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows."

"[of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones] [it is] like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous divine; and however we may be entertained by the way, we must not forget that our ultimate duty is to be instructed."

"In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons."

"I haven't a creature to talk to...How in Boston, when the evening arrives, and I am tired of reading, and know it would be better to do something else, can I go to the theater? I have tried it, ad nauseam. Likewise calling. Upon whom?""

"Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine."

"The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master."

"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."

"Deep experience is never peaceful."

"Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!"

"My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life."

"There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized."

"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."

"Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors."

"There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."

"A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it."

"If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?"

"To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live."

"The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman."

"The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism."

"The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument."

"However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing."

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities."

"Print it as it stands — beautifully."

"The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?"

"The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending."

"Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet."

"He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window."

"I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect."

"We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."

"I still, in presence of life... have reactions — as many as possible... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions — appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing — and I do. I believe I shall do yet again — it is still an act of life."

"The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life."

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."

"The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian."

"If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land."

"Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

"So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!"

"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

"Cecilia had moreover a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it."

"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."

"The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders."

"We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted."

"It is nothing against the validity of a friendship that the parties to it have not a mutual resemblance. There must be a basis of agreement, but the structure reared upon it may contain a thousand disparities."

"I know, of course, nothing about vice, but I have known virtue when it was very tiresome." "Ah, then it was a poor affair. It was poor virtue. The best virtue is never tiresome." Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye. "What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!"

"In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice. When I say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it."

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

"One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left."

"Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable."

"He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal."

"It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them."

"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."

"She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause."

"Don't undervalue irony; it is often of great use."

"Mrs Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity."

"Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett."

"She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] [...]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself."

"There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding."

"If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. [...] You know that what you ask is impossible [...] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly."

"Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all."

"She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed."

"I don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them."

"To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake."

"Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself."

"The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural."

"She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action."

"She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy."

"The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park."

"You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!"

"Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: [...]."

"What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar."

"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life."

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."

"The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes."

"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."

"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!""

"What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"

"We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple — to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things."

"There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason."

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be."

"...I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!"

"I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I - well, I had them."

"It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other — for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended— the doors we had indiscreetly opened."

"The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance — all strewn with crumpled playbills."

"Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature."

"He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come."

"It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead."

"I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?"

"With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped."

"I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob."

"Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box."

"People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid."

"Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?[…] What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.[…] The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.[…] Live!"

"[T]here are women who are for all your "times of life." They're the most wonderful sort."

"When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them."

"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."

"[S]he had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned there, in her cave of treasures, like a lamp in a Byzantine vault."

"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."

"There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs."

"To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of."

"Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone."

"The fatal futility of Fact."

"No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong."

"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality."

"To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own."

"The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take."

"We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar."

"The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!""

"In art economy is always beauty."

"The terrible fluidity of self-revelation."

"the fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us...under the rustling pines....[talked of] a hundred human and personal things....[It was] high talk [in the] splendid American summer drawn out to its last generosity....[the talkers constituted] a little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all so instructively sane and secure association and conversation, with all its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and earnestness."

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

"Ideas are, in truth, force."

"Life's too short for chess."

"It's not that he "bites off more than he can chaw," as T. G. Appleton said of Nathan, but he chaws more than he bites off."

"The book was very hard to write because I was too young when I started, seventeen; it was really about me and my father. There were things I couldn't deal with technically at first. Most of all, I couldn't deal with me. This is where reading Henry James helped me, with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single intelligence to tell the story. He gave me the idea to make the novel happen on John's birthday…The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first person perspective, which the reader has no reason to trust-why should you need this I? How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page?"

"(What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?) A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, could speak very eloquently for herself. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that what the Republic was doing to that woman, it was also doing to itself. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society. (Are there any white writers you would describe as witnesses?) Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James, Proust."

"I don't, for example, conjure up characters for the express purpose of despising them, of breaking their humps in public. I used to be astounded at Henry James et al., so nice nasty about it too, soooo refined. Gothic is of no interest to me. I try not to lend energy to building grotesqueries, depicting morbid relationships, dramatizing perversity."

"It took me years to ascertain that Henry James' work was giving me little pleasure: In each case I ask myself: "What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?" Question unanswerable! I gave up. To-day I have no recollection whatever of any characters of any events in either novel."

"I took H.J. to a secluded seat, and we had a talk... I questioned him about his ways of work. He admitted that he worked every day, dictated every morning, and began a new book the instant the old one was finished. He said it was his only chance because he worked so slowly, and excised so much. I asked him when the inception and design of a new book was formed; and he gave no satisfactory answer to this except to roll his eyes, to wave his hand about, to pat my knee and to say, "It's all about, it's about —— it's in the air —— it, so to speak, follows me and dogs me.""

"... A page of Mr James's later novels is like some vast, high-lifted park, exposing its densely-clad slopes to the rays of a late sun, embossed with the domes of verdure of a hundred shades of green, elms, oaks, and beeches contrasting with dusky pines and the slender silvery poplars of France the whole slope drinking, absorbing the light, blending and fusing its myriad tones and shades. Eidullia, little pictures of an infinite grace, come, as in Dante, to enhance the distinguished charm of the composition."

"James's earlier work had often substituted a character's impression of an event for the event itself. These pages do more - they change our very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well."

"He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry."

"When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun."

"His sensitive appreciation of the minute distinctions, the fine shades, the all but inaudible tones, in the intercourse of very civilized people, together with his now complete mastery of his craft, began to give his work the strange and deeply individual aspect which it wore increasingly to the end. His style, matching the extreme subtlety of his perceptions and discriminations, developed an intricacy which might sometimes appear perversely obscure, though at its best it is really the simple expression of the effects he sought—suggestive, evocative effects, that gradually shape out a solid impression."

"Even the most enthusiastic admirers of James's later work have sometimes felt that the importance of his subjects was hardly equal to the immense elaboration of his treatment of them—a judgement more crudely expressed by saying that ‘nothing happens’ in his books, for all their densely packed extent. It is true that his central theme, baldly stated, is often a small affair, and that he seldom allows a glimpse of the fiercer passions that are the common stock-in-trade of the novelist. But this criticism implies some misunderstanding of his view of a subject—the importance of which he held to depend primarily on the value, the intelligence, and the sensibility, of the people involved. An event is nothing in itself; the question is what a fine mind will make of it; and more and more, in James's books, the characters tended to become men and women of rare and acute perception, capable of making the utmost of all their experience. A very simple theme, entrusted to a few such people, would give him more than enough for dramatic development; and if their deeper feelings remain all but hidden under the delicate surface-play of their reflections and reactions, it was because the last results and furthest implications of a thing were to him always more significant, more charged with history, than the thing itself in its nakedness could possibly be. Hence his dislike of the raw, the crude, the staring, his love of the toned and seasoned and civilized, both in literature and in life."

"To listen to him was like watching an artist at work; the ample phrases slowly uncoiled, with much pausing and hesitating for the choice word, and out of them was gradually constructed the impression of the scene or the idea in his mind; when it was finished the listener was in possession of a characteristic product of Henry James's art. It was hardly to be called conversation, perhaps; it was too magnificent, too deliberate, for the give-and-take of a mixed gathering; but his companionable humour, his quick sensibility, his ornate and affectionate courtesy, set it further still from any appearance of formality or display. Though in any company he was certain to be the dominant, preponderant figure, his interest and his participation in the life around him were unfailing, and he seemed to have the gift of creating a special, unique relation with every one who came his way."

"After a luncheon party of which he had been, as they say, "the life", we happened to be drinking our coffee together while the rest of the party had moved on to the verandah. "What a charming picture they make," he said, with his great head aslant, "the women there with their embroidery, the..." There was nothing in his words, anybody might have spoken them; but in his attitude, in his voice, in his whole being at that moment, I divined such complete detachment that I was startled into speaking out of myself. "I can't bear to look at life like that," I blurted out, "I want to be in everything. Perhaps that is why I cannot write, it makes me feel absolutely alone..." The effect of this confession upon him was instantaneous and surprising. He leant forward and grasped my arm excitedly; "Yes, it is solitude. If it runs after you and catches you, well and good. But for heaven's sake don't run after it. It is absolute solitude." And he got up hurriedly and joined the others."

"I am reading another Henry James called The Ambassadors the man is uncanny the way he unravels a psychological situation. He writes in about five dimensions – and in that gorgeous convoluted style which, if you give it your closest attention, is nevertheless not obscure."

"James's repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel."

"Henry James is at once the most and least appreciated figure in American writing. His authority as a novelist of unique quality and as an archetypal American has grown immeasurably in the years since his death, and in some literary circles his name has of late been turned into the password of a cult. But at the same time he is still regarded, in those circles that exert the major influence on popular education and intelligence, with the coldness and even derision that he encountered in the most depressed period of his career, when his public deserted him and he found himself almost alone."

"In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a . Within a very few years he could have had a Freudian analysis, traveled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even space travel."

"He dictated beautifully. He had a melodious voice and in some way he seemed to be able to tell if I was falling behind. Typewriting for him was exactly like accompanying a singer on the piano... They seemed to spread out across the page like a beautiful and rambling architecture of this medieval town, to give his work a lonely individuality and a particular place in literature."

"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire."

"Faith is a beautiful thing. So are forest fires, and the color of gangrene. I think faith—especially capital-F Faith—is more dangerous and more disgusting than either. It is a substitute for thought."

"I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud. The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud. Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field."

"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content."

"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

"It means "Ask the next question." Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It's the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created. This guy is sitting in a cave and he says, "Why can't man fly?" Well, that's the question. The answer may not help him, but the question now has been asked. The next question is what? How? And so all through the ages, people have been trying to find out the answer to that question. We've found the answer, and we do fly. This is true of every accomplishment, whether it's technology or literature, poetry, political systems or anything else. That is it. Ask the next question. And the one after that."

"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species."

"It's the simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that."

"That Heel. That lousy wart on the nose of progress."

"In its shelter they developed a weapon. What is was we shall never know, and our race will live—or we shall know, and our race will perish as theirs perished."

"He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field, for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the field than they do in an office."

"And those he met who had been hurt by war and who still hated the late enemy—those who would have been happy to go back and kill some more, reckoning vital risk well worth it—those he considered mad, and forgot them."

"I have been curious about how much personal motive you had for your work. I think that answers it pretty well. I think, too, that you believe what you are saying. Do you know that people who do things for impersonal motives are as rare as fur on a fish?"

"Show me a nagging woman and I’ll show you one who hasn’t enough to worry about."

"“Metallurgy! A girl like you mucking about with molybs and durals instead of heartbeats and hope chests!” “Mother, sweetheart, hasn’t occurred to you at all that I don’t want to get married? Not yet, anyway.” “Of course it has. That doesn’t alter the fact that a woman is only forty percent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty percent a woman until she has children. As for you and your precious career, I seem to remember something about a certain Marie Sklodowska who didn’t mind marrying a fellow called Curie, science or no science.”"

"“Oh well. Chacun à son goût, as they say, which means—” And she stopped me. “Please. Don’t translate. It couldn’t be phrased as well in English.” I had been about to say “—which means Jack’s son has the gout.”"

"Half of humanity doesn’t know what it wants or how to find out. The other half knows what it wants, hasn’t got it, and is going crazy trying to convince itself that it already has it."

"I remember wondering smokily whether anyone ever loves a person. People seem to love dreams instead, and for the lucky ones, the person is close to the dream. But it’s a dream all the same, a sticky dream. You unload the person, and the dream stays with you."

"Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen."

"As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con."

"“God,” he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”"

"The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken."

"There’s this about a farm: when the market’s good there’s money, and when it’s bad there’s food."

"So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain."

"That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe."

"Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic."

"Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function."

"Love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with."

"Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!"

"Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them."

"An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking."

"The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and … and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives."

"Here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew — not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity."

"I wouldn’t give you sand if I met you on the beach."

"This country has music through its blood and bones like a disease, and a man cannot draw in a breath of air that isn’t a-thrum with it."

"A man with talent eats, sweats, and cares for his children like any other. And if talent is a natural thing, remember that water is also, and fire, and wind; therefore flood and holocaust and hurricane are as natural as talent, and can consume and destroy you."

"Love, Caroline, isn’t…that. Love is everything else that can be between a man and a woman, without that."

"There are always many ways to accomplish anything, but only one of them is really best. Which of them is best—that is the source of all argument on the production of anything, the creator of factions among the designers, and the first enemy of speed and efficiency."

"There were a lot of people living in his time who never did latch on to the idea that the curve of technological progress was not a flat slanting line like a diving board, but a geometrical curve like a ski-jump. These wistful and mixed-up souls were always suffering from attacks of belated conservatism, clutching suddenly at this dying thing and that, trying to keep it or bring it back. It wasn’t real conservatism at all, of course, but an unthought longing for the dear old days when one could predict what would be there tomorrow, if not next week. Unable to get the big picture, they welcomed the conveniences, the miniaturization of this and the speed of that, and then were angrily confused when their support of these things changed their world."

"You have questions—urgent questions—I know that. And what makes them urgent is that you have in your mind the answers you want to hear. You will be more and more angry if you do not get those answers, but some can’t be given as you would hear them, because they would not be true."

"And Charlie asked questions! His unease had long since disappeared, and two of his most deep-dyed characteristics took over: one, the result of his omnivorous, undisciplined, indefatigable reading and picking of brains; second, the great gaping holes this had left in his considerable body of knowledge. Both appeared far more drastic than he had heretofore known; he knew ever so much more than he knew he knew, and he had between five and seven times as much misinformation and ignorance than he had ever dreamed."

"As Adam said when his wife fell out of the tree—Eve’s dropping again."

"“Now how can you like a man without wanting him?” she demands of herself aloud. There is no answer. It is an article of faith with her. If you like a man, it has to be because you want him. Whoever heard of it any other way?"

"Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?"

"Mankind has in it a crushing need to feel superior. This doesn’t have to bother the very small minority who actually are superior, but it sure troubles the controlling majority who are not. If you can’t be really good at anything, then the only way to be able to prove you are superior is to make someone else inferior. It is this rampaging need in humanity which has, since pre-history, driven a man to stand on the neck of his neighbor, a nation to enslave another, a race to tread on a race. But it is also what men have done to women. Did they actually find them inferior to begin with, and learn from that to try to feel superior to other things outside—other races, religions, nationalities, occupations? Or was it the other way around: did men make women inferior for the same reason they tried to dominate the outsider? Which is cause, which effect?"

"A pig among people is a pig, he tells himself, but a pig among pigs is people."

"You cannot be objective about this because you have been indoctrinated, sermonized, drenched, imbued, inculcated and policed on the matter since first you wore blue booties. You come from a time and place in which the maleness of the male, and the femaleness of the female, and the importance of their difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation."

"So it is easily seen that the sexual insignes are nothing in themselves, for any of them, in another time and place, might belong to both sexes, the other sex, or neither. In other words, a skirt does not make the social entity, woman. It takes a skirt plus a social attitude to do it. But all through history, in virtually every culture and country, there has indeed been a “woman’s province” and a “man’s province,” and in most cases the differences between them have been exploited to fantastic, sometimes sickening extremes. Why?"

"There is in mankind a deep and desperate necessity to feel superior. In any group there are some who genuinely are superior...but it is easy to see that within the parameters of any group, be it culture, club, nation, profession, only a few are really superior; the mass, clearly, are not. But it is the will of the mass that dictates the mores, initiated though changes may be by individuals or minorities; the individuals or minorities, more often than not, are cut down for their trouble. And if a unit of the mass wants to feel superior, it will find a way. This terrible drive has found expression in many ways, through history—in slavery and genocide, xenophobia and snobbery, race prejudice and sex differentiation. Given a man who, among his fellows, has no real superiority, you are faced with a bedevilled madman who, if superiority is denied him, and he cannot learn one or earn one, will turn on something weaker than himself and make it inferior. The obvious, logical, handiest subject for this inexcusable indignity is his woman. He could not do this to anyone he loved."

"There are only three ways of dealing with sex. It may be gratified; it may be repressed; or it may be sublimated. The latter is, through history, often an ideal and frequently a success, but it is always an instability."

"Pleasure, the outer edge of ecstasy, was in the dour days of Protestantism, considered sinful in itself, wherever gained; Rome held specifically that any or all sexual pleasure was sinful. And for all this capped volcano produced in terms of bridges and houses, factories and bombs, it gouted from its riven sides a frightful harvest of neurosis. And even where a nation officially discarded the church, the same repressive techniques remained, the same preoccupation with doctrine, filtered through the same mesh of guilt. So sex and religion, the real meaning of human existence, ceased to be meaning and became means; the unbridgeable hostility between the final combatants was the proof of the identity of their aim—the total domination, for the ultimate satisfaction of the will to superiority, of all human minds."

"Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality. Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government—one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless—a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude toward sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes of the sexes, and a dread of incest."

"I liked his work because he was such a good craftsman. Sometimes science fiction writers were more pulp writers than they had to be because they didn't bother to learn. I'm talking about the old-time science fiction writers now, the ones who were more concerned with the wonderful machine than with the people who were supposed to be having something to do with the machine. They didn't characterize very well. Their women characters in particular were stick people, puppets, and Sturgeon, even though he was easily old enough to be my father, didn't write that way, and a few others didn't write that way. I especially paid attention to their writings... By the way, I don't believe that Sturgeon ever graduated from high school. He made a comment when he was teaching the class, an extension course: he said probably America is the only country where a man who never graduated from high school can teach at college. He might have had a point."

"Theodore Sturgeon was a well-known science fiction writer. He's dead now, but supposedly he was on a panel at a science fiction convention once when somebody complained to him, "Ted, 90 percent of science fiction is shit." Sturgeon said, "Ninety percent of everything is shit.""

"Theodore Sturgeon influenced me-he was a real craftsman. I probably liked The Synthetic Man, which was originally called The Dreaming Jewels, and More Than Human, the best. The writers who influenced me most tended to be those who were the most prolific."

"Besides, what difference did if make if there had been two genuine coincidences? The universe was full of them. Every molecular collision was a coincidence. You could pile a thousand coincidences on top of another, he averred, and not get Tom Digby one step nearer to believing in the supernatural. Oh, he knew intelligent people enough, all right, who coddled such beliefs. Some of his best friends liked to relate “yarns” and toy with eerie possibilities for the sake of a thrill. But the only emotion Tom ever got out of such stuff was a nauseating disgust. It cut too deep for joking. It was a reversion to that primitive, fear-bound ignorance from which science had slowly lifted man, inch by inch, against the most bitter opposition."

"He had the illusion, he said, of getting perilously close to the innermost secrets of the universe and finding they were rotten and evil and sardonic."

"I’ll have to learn to snowshoe. I had my first lesson this morning and cut a ludicrous figure. I’ll be virtually a prisoner until I learn my way around. But any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!"

"There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood."

"That’s what everybody’s been looking for since the Year One—something a little more than sex."

"There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren’t the worst."

"I realized that wherever she came from, whatever shaped her, she’s the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything for and never really get. She’s the being that takes everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl."

"I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religions, too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, or an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have inner things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no man-made theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing."

"I thought of how people are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distance barring them off from each other."

"Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find."

"He had the dim realization that the universe, like a huge sleepy animal, knew what he was trying to do and was trying to thwart him. This feeling of opposition made him determined to outmaneuver the universe—not the first guy to yield to such a temptation, of course."

"Laymen always accuse actors of acting. Because we can portray genuine emotion, we're supposed to be unable to feel it. It's the oldest charge made against us."

"Every human being believes he is perfect in his way, even the most miserable scoundrel or dreamer."

"Naturally a parent pretends to his child to be a little more perfect than he actually is. To admit any of his real weaknesses would be too much like encouraging vice."

"“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some thick fur or the petals of flowers—you’ve never seen those, but you know our ice-flowers—or like the texture of flames, never twice the same. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as for the first.”"

"To understand why George fell for this story, one must remember his stifled romanticism, his sense of personal failure, his deep need to believe. The thing came to him like, or rather instead of, a religious conversion."

"“You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess,” he assured her. “It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them.”"

"Work and pray, Live on hay. You’ll get pie In the sky When you die— It’s a lie!"

"Two things will last to the end of time, at least for the tribes of Western Man, no matter how far his spaceships rove. They are sorcery and romantic love, which come to much the same thing in the end."

"Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York."

"There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken."

"The Seven Subjects of Sensational Journalism: crime, scandal, speculative science, insanity, superstitions such as numerology, monsters, and millionaires."

"Now when I was corresponding with Lovecraft I was very enthusiastic about Fort’s books, and without thinking twice, I wrote him about how the man had brought to light facts that science had neglected or denied. Whereupon Lovecraft courteously explain to me how scientists cannot accept “new facts” on the basis of single or scattered reports, even by competent technicians and observers, and that experiments or observations must be repeatable—there must be general agreement—before they can become part of the body of scientific knowledge. And this is quite true, of course. Scientists don’t arrive at the truth by inward certainty or by majority vote, but they do demonstrate it to each other (and to other men) by open and rational procedures. If an experiment or observation can’t be repeated, it can’t be accepted, no matter how great the reputation, scientific or otherwise, of the man who says he did it or saw it; the matter must then be tabled as an anecdote (perhaps an extremely interesting one) but unproven (it’s very much like that Scottish criminal-law verdict) until new evidence comes in, if ever. (That’s why, incidentally, there can’t be a true science of history, or of artistic creation, or a lot of other things; you can’t repeat the past to verify it; nor can you go back and rewrite Hamlet to check up.)"

"No wonder without fear, no fear without wonder—that’s the rule for the cosmic weird tale and also the compensation for the pains of fear, the jewel in the toad’s head."

"Not “according to rule” and “something more”—those are the watchwords of the literature of supernatural dread."

"To merit serious consideration, fiction of any sort must satisfy one pragmatic requirement (making due allowance for the time and place when it was written): Does it convince the reader?"

"Understatement is the horror writer’s surest tool. Fritz Leiber, Terror, Mystery, Wonder in The World Fantasy Awards Volume Two, p. xxxi"

"Then he was running not so much away from the cold and its crippling, supernatural horrors, as toward civilization, which was once again a bright emblem in his brain, an answer to all small-mindedness."

"Sooner give a cobra a kiss, than a secret to a woman."

"Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape."

"Afterward loses too many battles to Too Late."

"I know, I know, the folk here are narrow-visioned, custom-bound. But matched with the twisted minds of civilization, they’re straight as pines."

"Women are horrible. I mean, quite as horrible as men. Oh, is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?"

"Aye, we played at being mice, forgetting cats are real."

"And I, well, in the month I’ve been here I’ve learned that the only way to survive in civilization is to abide by its unwritten rules—far more important than its laws chiseled in stone—and break them only at peril, in deepest secrecy, and taking all precautions."

"For what is life but greed in action?"

"Fafhrd retorted, a little hotly, “Killing in fight isn’t murder.” Again the Mouser shrugged. “Killing is murder, no matter what nice names you give. Just as eating is devouring, and drinking guzzling.”"

"Revenge is empty. It cannot bring back the dead."

"We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness."

"“Oaths are made to be kept only until their purpose be fulfilled,” the fluty voice responded. “Every geas is lifted at last, every self-set rule repealed. Otherwise orderliness in life becomes a limitation to growth; discipline, chains; integrity, bondage and evil-doing.”"

"Thieves and astrologers moved restlessly in their sleep, sensing that the hours of night and work were drawing near."

"Let fools seek it. They shall win it not. For although my treasure house be empty as air, no deadly creature in rocky lair, no sentinel outside anywhere, no pitfall, poison, trap, or snare, above and below the whole place bare, of demon or devil not a hair, no serpent lethal-fanged yet fair, no skull with mortal eye a-glare, yet have I left a guardian there. Let the wise read this riddle and forbear."

"Unlike men, rubies and emeralds do not rest quietly in their graves."

"“What’s the use of knowing the name of a skull? One would never have occasion to talk of it,” said the fat thief loudly. “What interests me is that it has rubies for eyes.”"

"Too much good luck was always dangerous."

"They, like many priests, had been much too fanatical and not nearly as clever as the god they served."

"Girls had a way of blotting out all lesser, but not thereby despicable, delights. Girls were for dessert."

"The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but—doubtless because they are afraid someone will some day raise the ever-unpleasant question of the true worth of things—they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk at and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale."

"The Devourers want to brood about their great service to the many universes—it is their claim that servile customers make the most obedient subjects for the gods."

"“So tell me, giant philosopher, why we’re not dukes,” the Gray Mouser demanded, unrolling a forefinger from the fist on his knee so that it pointed across the brazier at Fafhrd. “Or emperors, for that matter, or demigods.” “We are not dukes because we’re no man’s man,” Fafhrd replied smugly, setting his shoulders against the stone horse-trough. “Even the duke must butter up a king, and demigods the gods. We butter no one. We so our own way, choosing our own adventures—and our own follies! Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.” “There speaks the hound turned out by his last master and not yet found new boots to slaver on,” the Mouser retorted with comradely sardonic impudence."

"Aye, there’s the bitter core of all freedom: no pay!"

"Bored and insecure men will loose arrows at dust motes."

"Pulg, alongside his pink streak of sentimentality, had recently taken to sporting a gray one of superstition."

"There would have been no insurmountable problem at all, of course, if Bwadres had only had that touch of realism about money matters that, when a true crisis arises, is almost invariably shown by even the fattest, greediest priest or the skinniest, most unworldly holy man."

"I can see now that if I’d stayed I’d have gone the way of Pulg and all such Great Men—fat, power-racked, lieutenant-plagued, smothered with false-hearted dancing girls, and finally falling into the arms of religion. At least I’m saved that last chronic ailment, which is worse than the dropsy."

"Know it or not, man treads between abysses a tightrope that has neither beginning nor end."

"It was the laughter of the Elder Gods observing their creature man and noting their omissions, miscalculations and mistakes."

"That is as far from the truth as I am from the Secret of the Sphinx."

"It was more a patriotic than religious matter with Fafhrd. He believed in Odin only during moments of sentimental weakness."

"They are in their fashion fearless, irreligiously considering themselves the coequals of destiny and having only contempt for the Demigoddess of Chance, the Imp of Luck, and the Demon of Improbability."

"Eventually the tale came to an end, suddenly and seemingly in the middle, like a piece of foreign music."

"He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows."

"Knowledge takes precedence over death."

"The worst thing about mountain climbing is that the easy parts go so quickly."

"Let never the gems of business be mixed with the jewels of pleasure."

"He knew that sooner or later, in spite of all protecting charms and precautions, Death would creep silently on him or spring suddenly from some unguarded moment. This very night his horoscope might signal Death’s instant escapeless approach; and though men lived by lies, treating truth’s very self as lie to be exploited, the stars remained the stars."

"With a happy roaring shout only he could hear, blood rushed through the Mouser’s arteries toward his center, reviving his limp manhood in a mere moment, as a magically summoned genie offhandedly builds a tower."

"This was ecstacy indeed, he assured himself. It seemed to him that he was now in the Ninth and topmost Heaven, where a few select heroes luxuriate and dream and submit themselves to almost unendurable pleasures, at whiles glancing down with lazy amusement at all the gods toiling at their sparrow-watching and incense-sniffing and destiny-directing on the many tiers below."

"When one achieves revenge, the innocent perforce suffer."

"The more brilliant the enchanted male, the stupider the enchanting female."

"Now it may be that in the world of Newhon there are gods of whom even Death does not know and who from time to time take pleasure in putting obstacles in his path. Or it may be that Chance is quite as great a power as Necessity."

"For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart."

"“There are some things man was not meant to know,” the Mouser said in a most portentous voice. Then, swiftly switching to the familiar, “or rather, since I am in no way superstitious, there are some things that have not yet yielded to our philosophy.”"

"And just think what rare delights—nay, what whole sets of ecstasies and blisses—this much gold would buy. How fortunate that metal was mindless slave of the man who held it!"

"Inconsiderate creatures, gods were."

"That was another trouble with women, they were never there when you wanted or really needed them. They helped each other, all right, but they expected men to do all sorts of impossible feats of derring-do to prove themselves worthy of the great gift of their love (and what was that when you got down to it?—a fleeting clench-and-wriggle in the dark, illuminated only by the mute, incomprehensible perfection of a dainty breast, that left you bewildered and sad)."

"But oh, this lifelong servitude to girls—whimsical, innocent, calculating, icicle-eyed and hearted, fleeting, tripping little demons! White, slim-necked, sharp-toothed, restlessly bobbing weasels with the soulful eyes of lemurs!"

"Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?"

"Food for the hungry Isle. There was your real thinking man’s treasure, he told himself, beside which gold and twinkling jewels were merest trinkets, or the pointy breasts of young love or words of poets or the pointed stars themselves that astrologers cherished and that made men drunk with distance and expanse."

"Women have power over men almost as great as gods do."

"And the mighty are great worriers and spend much time preventing anything that troubles their peace of mind."

"“Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors,” the harbormaster answered him, “while truth plods on in sober garb.”"

"Old legends said Death had a skinny sister denominated Pain, passionately devoted to the loathsome torture that often was Death’s prelude."

"Great conquerors live on as their enemies’ devils."

"Yes, indeed, he assured himself rapidly, things did seem to be working around to a grand payoff in the great game of trading heroic feats for intimate maidenly favors that all heroes lived or at least hoped by, no matter how disordered and irregular the bookkeeping."

"“You have been told that the Great God rules the universe—earth and sky. I tell you the Great God is fake!”"

"But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!"

"No matter how hard and wearisome an age this might be, it was certainly a very exciting one with regard to manifestations of the supernatural."

"“Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it. “Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose. “Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.”"

"What is idealism? It is distortion. A giving of false values to things which in reality do not possess those values. Personalities differ chiefly in their pattern of values. When the values are largely false, the personality is unstable."

"He knew that ahead lay many perils—threats to his bodily welfare. And recently Jarles had come to have a great respect for that bag of flesh and bones which contained his ego."

"The idea of brutality actually shocks him, thought Goniface amusedly. I wonder what name he has for the toil we exact of the commoners, and the penances we impose on them?"

"I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy—unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!"

"“Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.” “They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.”"

"“Conscience is only social pressure,” he told her, tense without quite knowing why, “the impulse to submerge your ego in that of the herd, and do what other people want you to because you’re afraid of their censure. Realistic self-interest frees a person from the childish restrictions of conscience.” “Are you sure of that, Jarles? What about your dreams? Conscience may be partly what you say it is, but it’s more than that. It’s hearkening to the wisest thoughts that have occurred to the minds of the human race.”"

"After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything."

"Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class."

"What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb."

"A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences."

"Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all."

"What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?"

"Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse."

"He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest With the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood."

"Hey, am I dreaming?...Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line? The second question, though not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!"

"The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition."

"For a full century now Americans have been living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion, comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can only grope for a name—I’m writing an unpopular book on the subject, you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?"

"They sat in small parties with a truculent quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere."

"What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!"

"I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten."

"It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos — and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards! — masquerading as benign omniscient authority."

"Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards."

"In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it’s true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents."

"Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot."

"Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time."

"Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself."

"Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears."

"For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?"

"Humans aren’t as you idealized them, Blanda. Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds, Blanda, and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex."

""Excuse me, Gaspard,” Flaxman interjected, “but would you mind turning the emotional down and the factual up?”"

"Their feeble attempts to appear concerned only made them look to him more like two fat cats full of stolen cream and with a map of the secret tunnel leading to the meat locker tucked inside their fur vests."

"“How like humans,” he said drily. “The universe is vast, majestic, intricate, patterned with inexhaustible beauty, vivid with infinitely varied life—and there’s only one thing in it that really interests you. The same thing that makes you buy books, build families, create atomic theories (I imagine) or, once upon a time, write poetry. Sex.”"

"To Space-Age man, every mystery is a greed-magnet."

"I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!"

"It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens."

"There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky."

"They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say “planet” and “spaceship” to them, they still think “horoscope” and “flying saucer”."

"Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours."

"Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other."

"There was an omnipresent sense of crisis."

"The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence."

"Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order."

"Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried."

"The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils."

"What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love."

"Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery."

"You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior."

"It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did."

"I am up to date only sporadically. I live firmly in the world of art, where reality and fantasy are one."

"Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art."

"I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence."

"What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end."

"“You’ve got to believe there’s some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.” “Crazies?” “All of us.”"

"There they go, off to Venus, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal."

"The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes."

"Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off."

"Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people."

"My first decision about a career was at eleven, to be a and travel the world with my . My second decision was at twelve when I got a toy typewriter for Christmas. And I decided to become a . And between the decision and the reality lay eight years of junior high school, high school, and selling newspapers on a street corner in Los Angeles, while I wrote three million words."

"All flesh is one: what matter scores; Or color of the suit Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold? All is one bold achievement, All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green…"

"Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers."

"All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn."

"YOUR INFLUENCE ON US ALL, FROM 1939 ON, CANNOT BE MEASURED. I CAN ONLY SAY I REMEMBER, WARMLY, YOUR MANY KINDNESSES TO ME WHEN I WAS 19–20–21 YEARS OLD. THAT YOUNG MAN BASKED IN YOUR LIGHT AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR THE HELP YOU OFFERED WHEN I WAS SO POOR & NEEDFUL!"

"We clothe ourselves in flame And trade new myths for old. The Greek gods christen us With ghosts of comet swords; God smiles and names us thus: " "Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!""

"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better."

"I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?"

"My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."

"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together."

"From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be."

"Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day."

"Oh God, without them [libraries], what have we? We have no past and we have no future."

"The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

"I've always written at the top of my lungs and from some secret motives within. I have followed the advice of my good friend Federico Fellini who, when asked about his work, said, "Don't tell me what I'm doing, I don't want to know.""

"Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."

"My job is to help you fall in love."

"Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here."

"We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe.... If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal."

"The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive."

"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."

"The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best."

"At the end of June in 1939 I took a bus east to New York to attend the first World Science Fiction convention. On the bus with me I took the June of Astounding Science-Fiction in which the short story by A. E. van Vogt appeared. It was an astonishing encounter. In that same issue with him were C. L. Moore and Ross Rocklynne, a fantastic issue to take with me on that long journey, for I was still a poor unpublished writer selling newspapers on a street corner for ten dollars a week and hoping, someday, to be an established writer myself, but that was still two years off. On the way I drank in the words of A.E. Van Vogt and was stunned by what I saw there. He became a deep influence for the next year. As it turned out, I didn't become A.E. Van Vogt, no one else could, and when I finally met him was pleased to see that the man was as pleasant to be with as were his stories. I knew him over a long period of years and he was a kind and wonderful gentleman, a real asset to the Science Fantasy Society in L.A., where there are a lot of strange people. A.E. Van Vogt was not strange, he was kind. He gave me advice and helped me along the road to becoming what I wanted to become."

"If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were."

"Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel."

"Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid."

"I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it."

"I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious."

"A life's work should be based on love."

"There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel."

"At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love."

"Joy is the grace we say to God."

"We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves."

"We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now."

"If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life."

"I write fantasy. The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened."

"I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck."

"The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land."

"Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young."

"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose."

"I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I’ve got what amounts to a religion, now."

"They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."

"I’m being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite."

"Ignorance is fatal."

"The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly."

"Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless... “What are you looking at so hard, Dad?” “I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.” “All that up there?” “No. I didn’t find it. It’s not there any more. Maybe it’ll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there.”"

"We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly."

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door."

"With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual," of course, became the swear word it deserved to be."

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none."

"You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are."

"If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn."

"Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?"

"Montag, you're looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself."

"Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."

"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

"Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."

"For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture."

"For, let's face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail."

"The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth, and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself."

"All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television."

"On the whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he’d have to listen."

"In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices."

"“And what happened next?” “Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful.”"

"The telephone rang like a spoiled brat."

"Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back hoping and waiting until—bang!"

"“I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.”"

"I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life."

"Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine. “I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle."

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."

"THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…"

"“Don’t these people ever get lonely?” “They’re used to it this way.” “Don’t they get afraid, then?” ”They have a religion for that.” “I wish I had a religion.” “The minute you get a religion you stop thinking,” he said. “Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”"

"More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder."

"“It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife. “I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”"

"“Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.” That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him."

"Anna said, “Must they have a reason?” “No, not if they’re insane, no,” said Juliet. “In that case no reasons are necessary.”"

"He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing."

"All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past."

"The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool."

"Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly."

"Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see."

"Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft."

"“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”"

"Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another."

"“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Well.” She started pouring tea. “To start things off, what do you think of the world?” “I don’t know anything.” “The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.” “You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.” “It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?” They both laughed quietly."

"Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you’re twenty."

"I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it."

"I’ve alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know."

"The sun did not rise, it overflowed."

"Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple."

"And then, quite suddenly, summer was over."

"Next year’s going to be even bigger, days will be brighter, nights longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it all."

"They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe."

"God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other."

"And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy."

"And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you, Will, for my money."

"“‘For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’”"

"If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people."

"Good to evil seems evil."

"Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts."

"The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them."

"Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye."

"“War!” The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived. But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting and killing?"

"Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power."

"Beware, Charlie, old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft."

"“You remember winning, don’t you? A battle won, somewhere?” “No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns."

"“You really talk,” he said. “Compulsive,” I said.” “You’d make a lousy writer,” he said. “I never knew a writer yet who was a good talker.”"

"I’d hate to have you running hell, the lost souls would never get fried!"

"There’s too much chance for shock. And yet I must tell her the truth. A doctor gets nowhere by lying to his patient."

"You’re a has-been that never was. And you’re going to stay that way, spoiled and narcissistic and small and mean and rotten."

"“You move against my ethics,” said the priest. “A drowning man clutches at anything,” said Nolan, “and ethics may drown with him if that’s what he grabs instead of a life belt.”"

"“Off the mount, Nolan,” said the priest, “and enough of the sermon. What’s your point?”"

"I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive."

"He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out."

"And though the debate may run another hundred thousand years: What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream..."

"She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter."

"But all the little inside-people sitting around in her head would rock back in their tiny rockers and cackle and say, “You ain’t foolin’ us none, Grandma.”"

"Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile."

"You know and I know, I am Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles."

"Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do. The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore."

"The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were."

"In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one’s life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost."

"I am a beautiful woman. I have been beautiful all of my life. Which means that from the start people lied because they simply wished to be with me. I grew up surrounded by the untruths of men, women, and children who could not risk my displeasure. When beauty pouts, the world trembles. Have you ever seen a beautiful woman surrounded by men, seen them nodding, nodding? Heard their laughter? Men will laugh at anything a beautiful woman says. Hate themselves, yes, but they will laugh, say no for yes and yes for no."

"And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness. The stars were manifold and bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don’t care."

"It’s big, it’s broad… It’s broad, it’s bright… It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night… The strangest sight you’ve ever seen. The Monster Tree on Halloween."

"The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile."

"The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave."

"O autumn winds that bake and burn And all the world to darkness turn, Now storm and seize and make of me… A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!"

"“What’s happening, Mr. Moundshroud? Where are we?” Moundshroud struck a flinty finger into fire and held it up. “Why, bless me, boys. It’s the Dark Ages. The longest darkest night ever.”"

"Mr. Moundshroud, who are YOU? And Mr. Moundshroud, way up there on the roof, sent his thoughts back: I think you know, boy, I think you know. Will we meet again, Mr. Moundshroud? Many years from now, yes, I’ll come for you. And a last thought from Tom: O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death? And the thought returned: When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die."

"Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear And say out prayers that most need saying For needful sinners who've forgotten praying; And in every alcove and niche you spy The living dead who envy the long since gone Who never wished to die."

"And from above a voice fused half in iron Half in irony gives man a dreadful choice. The role is his, it says, Man makes and loads his own strange dice, They sum at his behest, He dooms himself. He is his own sad jest. Let go? Let be? Why do you ask this gift from Me? When, trussed and bound and nailed, You sacrifice your life, your liberty You hang yourself upon the tenterhook. Pull free!"

"You make to die You are the dead You the assassin of yourself."

"You are the jailer and the jailed, You the impaler and the one that your own Million-fleshed self in dreams by night do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill."

"Why have you been so blind? Why have you never seen? The slave and master in one skin Is all your history, no more, no less, Confess! This is what you've been."

"The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar; A moment terrible to hear."

"Man warring on himself an old tale is; But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself, Finding his left hand and his right Are similar sons, are children fighting In the porchyards of the void?!"

"That so much time was wasted in this pain. Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down To not return again! A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips; The laughter sets him free. A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries. The Fool is me! And with one final shake of laughter Breaks his bonds. The nails fall skittering to marble floors. And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle As Man steps down in amiable wisdom To give himself what no one else can give: His liberty."

"Trapped in the blood, athirst for air, Christ, who once was employed as single Son of God Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold and walk them everywhere Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons…"

"Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move Through one great and towering town Wearing their wits, which means their laughter, As their crown. Set free upon the earth By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds And pull the blood spikes out; Their conversation shouts of "Fool!""

"A single face turned upward toward all Time One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace."

"I am the dreamer and the doer I the hearer and the knower I the giver and the taker I the sword and the wound of sword. If this be true, then let sword fall free from hand. I embrace myself. I laugh until I weep And weep until I smile…"

"Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings, In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep."

"“Recant!” Create a voice “confess and recant! Recant!” “There is nothing to confess, therefore no need for recantation,” said the old man quietly."

"How sad. The city unwrapped you like a candy bar and ate you all up. You’re nothing but a dusty milk bottle left on a tenement porch, a spider building a nest across the top. Traffic din pounded your marrow to dust. Subway sucked your breath like a cat sucks the soul of a babe. Vacuum cleaners got your brain. Alcohol dissolved the rest. Typewriters and computers took your final dregs in and out their tripes, printed you on paper, punched you in confettis, threw you down a sewer vent. TV scribbled you in nervous tics on old ghost screens. Your final bones will be carried off by a big angry bulldog crosstown bus holding you munched in its big rubber-lipped mouth door."

"God gives us dreadful gifts. The most dreadful of all is memory."

"You’re not God, are you? You don’t look like him."

"A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father’s picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time."

"The weather said it had been here forever, man was hardly here at all, and would soon be gone."

"“I didn’t mean…” said laughing. “Nobody means, but everybody says, and luckily I got the hide of an iguana.”"

"Kid, don’t tell us what we should be when you don’t even know what we are."

"He struck off into the forest, idly, drawn steadily by a sound that was large enough to fill the universe, the sound of a river going somewhere and not caring; the most beautiful sound of all."

"He waked through the green forest and listened to the various silences there. Not one silence, but several; the silence that the moss made underfoot, the silence the shadows made depending from the trees, the silence of small streams exploring tiny countries on all sides as he came into a clearing."

"“Watch your liver!” said his mother. “Is that a threat, or a toast?” said his father."

"I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return."

"“You go against the letter of the law!” “No,” explained the priest, calmly, “we but shift the punctuation, cross new t’s, dot new i’s.”"

"Whole town out there is up to their earholes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it’s always always and forever Sunday!"

"Q: How many times have people attempted to ban your work? RB: Very rarely, occasionally by little frogs in little puddles. It’s never anything serious. This comes up in any society where people have different opinions. You’re a Catholic and I’m a Baptist and we may have problems. If you’re a homosexual and I’m heterosexual, we may have problems. You’re black and I’m white. You’ve got all these differences and people get sensitive and they want to change all the books. And you have to tell them to go sit down somewhere."

"I didn’t write Fahrenheit 451 about us. I wrote it about Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler. … I may not even talk about book banning if I don’t feel like it. I don’t prepare anything ahead. I have a dozen subjects to talk about because I write plays and poetry and essays, short stories and novels and screenplays and teleplays and operas. I’ll get lost, and the audience will have a wonderful time. And I’ll get a standing ovation, and they’ll go home."

"I’m working on a screenplay of Fahrenheit 451 that will star Mel Gibson. It will be better than the original because they left a lot of things out of the first film. … It works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control."

"I’m a magician who writes about ideas. I’m not a science-fiction writer. People who call me that are wrong. Most of what I write is fantasy or magic realism or plays about my Mexican-American background."

"Q: What would you put on your suggested reading list? RB: All the plays of George Bernard Shaw. I go back to Shakespeare constantly. I go back to the great poets. And there are a lot of women in my life. Edith Wharton has been part of my life for at least 45 years, and she’s been discovered in the last few years because of The Age of Innocence. Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, these are all very important women writers. And then you pick up the short stories of Steinbeck and Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald is certainly our greatest American writer in the last 60 years."

"In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required."

"The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them."

"We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative. … People are talking about the Internet as a creative tool for writers. I say, "B.S. Stay away from that. Stop talking to people around the world and get your work done.""

"Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that."

"We should be back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately. … How come we're looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads."

"If NASA's budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don't mean Tupperware. … NASA feels it has to justify everything it does in practical terms. And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That's B.S. We don't need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever."

"We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained."

"I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing."

"When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way."

"Unfortunately, I don't think I keep my ego in check very well. I try to remember that my voice is loud, which is an ego problem. But at least I don't suffer from self-deluding identity problem like, say, Carl Sagan does. … With each passing year he grows stiffer because he goes around thinking he's Carl Sagan. Just as Norman Mailer thinks he's Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal thinks he's Gore Vidal. I don't think I'm Ray Bradbury. That's a big distinction. It doesn't matter who you are. You mustn't go around saying who you are, or else you get captured by the mask of false identity. It's the work that identifies you."

"I don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago."

"Summertime, 1950, I recognized Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, "Do you know what you've done?" I asked, "What?" And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since. He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out."

"You should read in your own field only when you're young. When I was 8, 10, 12, 16, 25, I read science fiction. But then I went on to Alexander Pope and John Donne and Moliere to mix it up."

"I foresaw political correctness 43 years ago. … whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. … I say to both bunches, Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them. All this political correctness that's rampant on campuses is B.S. You can't fool around with the dangerous notion of telling a university what to teach and what not to."

"The news is all rapes and murders we didn't commit, funerals we don't attend, AIDS we don't want to catch. All crammed into a quarter of a minute! But at least we still have a hand with which to switch channels or turn off altogether. I tell my lecture audiences to never, ever watch local TV news."

"Magazines today are almost all stupid and moronic to start with. And it makes me furious that I can't find any articles to read anymore. I used to enjoy Forbes and Fortune, but now the pages are completely cluttered with ads."

"There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?"

"Most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things."

"I was madly in love with Hollywood. … I was so blindly and madly in love with the film and radio business in Hollywood that I didn't realize what a pest I was. George no doubt thought he could get me off his back by using my words for one of the eight-line vignettes he had Gracie close their broadcasts with. I wanted to live that special life forever. When that summer was over, I stopped my inner time clock at the age of 14. Another reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination. … And strangely enough, my parents never protested. They just figured I was crazy and that God would protect me. Of course back then you could go around town at night and never risk getting mugged or beaten up."

"Here a human without a car is a samurai without his sword. I would replace cars wherever possible with buses, monorails, rapid trains — whatever is takes to make pedestrians the center of our society again, and cities worthwhile enough for pedestrians to live in. I don't care what people do with their cars, as long as they give them up three quarters of the time — roughly the amount of time people spend every week superfluously driving places they don't want to go to visit people who don't want to see them."

"When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice."

"I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children. … It's mutual delight and love made manifest. For one thing, kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way."

"Listen, you can't turn really bright people into robots. You can turn dumb people into robots, but that's true in every society and system. I don't know what to do with dumb people, but we must try to educate them along with the sharp kids. You teach a kid to read and write by the second grade, and the rest will take care of itself. To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root — first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured."

"On my seventieth birthday, when I reflected that so many of my friends were dead or dying, it hit me that it was high time I got more work done. Ever since that time, I have done the active, smart thing by increasing my productivity. I'm not on the rocks or shoals yet, but the last few years have been a devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends. [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry was a loss that deeply grieved me."

"I believe in Darwin and God together. It's all one. It's all mysterious. Look at the universe. It's been here forever. It's totally impossible."

"Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers.""

"I don't believe in the anthropomorphic God. … I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about."

"“Ain’t there a real fine smell?” said the taxi driver. “Just delivered five dozen loaves!” “That,” said the young man, “is the perfume of Eden on the first morn.”"

"“You implying I’m a mile off from the truth?” “I’m only implying,” Cardiff said, “that we are at a taffy pull. I’m waiting to see how far you pull it.”"

"“I suspect,” said Elias Culpepper, “you are in need of a drink.” “Two,” said Cardiff, “would be fine.”"

"“I learned long ago you lean one way, me and the other. You were always wrong, I was always right. I hate liars.” “‘Optimists’ is the word you want.” “No wonder I hate you. The world’s a cesspool and you keep swimming in it, heading for shore. Dear God, where is the shore? You’ll never find it because the shore doesn’t exist! We’re rats drowning in a sewer, but you see lighthouses where there are none. You claim the Titanic is Mark Twain’s steamboat. To you Svengali, Raskolnikov, and Hitler were the Three Stooges! I feel sorry for you. So I’m here to make you honest.” “Since when have you believed in honesty?” “Honesty, currency, and common sense. Never play funhouse slot machines, don’t toss red-hot pennies to the poor, or throw your landlady downstairs. Fine futures? Hell, the future’s now, and it’s rotten.”"

"News junkies love to read about others misery."

"Cardiff read these words: HOPE MEMORIAL LIBRARY. And in small letters beneath that: KNOW HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE."

"Since we have been gifted with long lives, the least we can do is pass that gift on in inanimate objects—novels, poems, plays—books that rouse to life when scanned by a living eye. You must never receive a gift, ever, without returning the gift twice over. From Jesus of Nazareth to noon tomorrow, our baggage is the library and its silent speech. Each book is Lazarus, yes? And you the reader, by opening the covers, bid Lazarus to come forth. And he lives again, it lives again, the dead words warmed by your glance."

"“No!” someone else cried, and a dozen others whispered, “No!” “That’s not possible,” someone said. “Anything,” said Cardiff, quietly, “in government, is possible.”"

"On my world, such comets are known as pilgrim visitors, far-traveling specters, haunters of the feast. You see? Our history has as much romantic nonsense as yours."

"Small man, great traveling doom—both weigh the same when the scale is death."

"“Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ’reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings. Lie down with machines, rise up castrato. Sweet Jesus, you’ll make the pope’s choir yet. Such innocent quakes my bones.”"

"We poisoned it with laughter. All around within it we rose, we fell, we rose again, mystified by Fate, hysterical with chance. We fired our laughs like cannons at its heart!"

"Thus they and theirs, and we and ours will shadow-show eternity, two films projected to opposite screens and nothing and nothing and nothing in between."

"Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

"Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.""

"Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible."

"Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. … If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic."

"New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me."

"I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us."

"When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt — all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction — but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I’ve found that I’m a lot like Verne — a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo — who in a way is the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab — goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace."

"I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing. -->"

"I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel?"

"My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student."

"I just can’t imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us."

"You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don’t. They have prejudices."

"Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school."

"I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the end where Ahab stands at the rail and says: “It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael.” I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. I’d been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board."

"The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours."

"My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this."

"I can work anywhere."

"As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles."

"Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things."

"I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they’re gone. That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you."

"Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is “at play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been fortunate. Very fortunate."

"I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them."

"I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing."

"Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too."

"In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other."

"Nikos Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy."

"The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance. It’s like my friend Mr. Electrico. … he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. … Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back. Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him. When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped. Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to."

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

"He describes himself as a "delicatessen religionist." He's inspired by Eastern and Western religions. The center of his faith, though, is love. Everything — the reason he decided to write his first short story at 12; his 56-year marriage to his muse and late wife, Maggie; his friendships with everyone from Walt Disney to Alfred Hitchcock — is based on love. Bradbury is in love with love."

"Bradbury has been called a Unitarian, but he rejects that term. He dislikes labels of any kind. "I'm a Zen Buddhist if I would describe myself," he says. "I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down." … Allusions to Christianity are common in his stories, but Bradbury doesn't define himself as a Christian. He considers Jesus a wise prophet, like Buddha and Confucius… "Jesus is a remarkable person … He was on his way to becoming Christ, and he made it.""

"Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction … Probably no other writer in this book could I get away with introducing in that way. But who in the civilized, book-reading world doesn't know the name Ray Bradbury? When the time came to write a few words to preface Ray, I suddenly was struck with the impossibility of the act. There have been whole treatises written on Bradbury, his poetic images, his humanity, his blue period, his chrome period … who the hell was I to write about him? Well, I'm a Bradbury fan, and that's not bad for openers. … Ray Bradbury is very probably better than we ever imagined him to be in our wildest promotion of him as the first sf writer to escape the ghetto and win approbation from such as Isherwood, Wilder, Fadiman, Algren, Gilbert Highet, Graham Greene, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffault and Bertrand Russell, for God's sake! Let's face it, fellow sf readers, we've been living off Ray Bradbury's success for twenty years. Every time we try to hype some non-believer into accepting sf and fantasy as legitimate literature, we refer him or her to the works of Ray Bradbury. Who the hell else have we produced who has approached the level of Bradbury for general acceptance? I mean, there's a Viking Portable Library edition of RAY BRADBURY. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov are well-known and much-beloved, but if you go out on the street and buttonhole the average shmendrik, and ask him to name a dozen famous American writers, if he isn't a dullard who'd name Erich Segal and Leon Uris and Jacqueline Whatshername, he'll rattle off Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mickey Spillane, maybe Faulkner, and very probably Bradbury. That's a load of ego-boost for all of us, and it's about time someone said it. When we do the conversion bit with scoffers, we whirl them over to the meager sf racks in most bookstores and we may find no Delany, no Lafferty, no Knight or Disch or Dickson, but by God we always find The Martian Chronicles. And we say, "Here try this. You'll love it." … I mean come on, all you smartass literary cynics who make points off other men's careers, can you ever really forget that thing that called to the foghorn from the sea? … I'll just tag out by saying Ray Bradbury is a man who has written some 300 stories …wrote the screenplay for John Huston's production of Moby Dick… wrote a "space age cantata" dealing with the possible images of Christ on other worlds, Christus Apollo, music by Jerry Goldsmith, and he is a very good, kind, committed man who was in no small part responsible for getting LBJ booted out of office. And he's the only man whose poetry I would have included in this, a book of stories. Well, maybe Robert Graves …"

"I knew Ray Bradbury off and on since 1980 when, as a student at the American Film Institute Center, I was asked if I could pick him up and bring him to school for his seminar. You see, Ray never learned how to drive. But he knew very well how to give encouragement and enthusiasm to anyone."

"He was kind, and gentle, with that midwestern niceness that’s a positive thing rather than an absence of character."

"Ray Bradbury was never one of my favorite authors: He’s a little soft, kind of romantic, and, worst of all, moralizing. But The Martian Chronicles is a great book."

"In the science fiction genre, I am a fan of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...for me, the greatest discovery of my childhood reading life: Ray Bradbury...Ray became my literary father. He was the one who taught me about the world, and he was a great teacher. I think every 12-year-old should read him (and every adult as well, but 12-year-olds are so much better readers). “Fahrenheit 451” is an American classic and a work of genius, and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” is my favorite of his books, small-town magic. I loved them all and still do. I admired Ray as a writer and a person and wish he was still here with us."

"I spent one entire summer reading Ray Bradbury...I remained in Ray Bradbury's world for as long as possible. It was a place where it was possible to recognize good from evil, darkness from light. I was a cynical kid, and I didn't have much faith in the world, but I trusted Ray Bradbury. I took everything he said personally. (p 33)"

"Ray Bradbury...writes with such breathless enthusiasm and from an obvious appreciation of beauty."

"I think Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy ever written in the English language."

"("How much do you have to know about science to write science fiction?") It is good to know something about at least one field, so that you know how scientists think and how science is done, if you're going to have a any science or even any pseudo-science in your stories. But there is a requirement: that a science fiction writer be interested in science. He may hate it; I think Ray Bradbury hates it. I know he hates technology, and I rather think he hates science. But he's interested in it. It's got down into his subconscious and it comes up in the form of horrors and monsters. But he takes it seriously."

"Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, despite its incoherencies, is a lovely, enduring book."

"The guy keeps writing about Jesus, but he doesn't consider himself a Christian … He says faith is necessary but that we should accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything."

"You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in."

"Now he had form and substance. He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades ago. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain circles — middle-class circles — it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful."

"Where did he get jelly beans? That's another good question. More than likely it will never be answered to your complete satisfaction. But then, how many questions ever are?"

"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."

"TO HELL WITH YOU. BUT THEN YOU'RE THERE, AREN'T YOU?"

"Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled."

"Art was not reality—it was only the appearance of reality."

"And thus I arrive at the foundation of my theory about art as a vehicle for dissent: the fury and purity of the creator’s need to say something motivates the work, but he forms it from logic and craft and honesty and when the propaganda value has faded into last week’s imperative, the art remains behind and stands on its own merits."

"Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artificial responsibilities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year...in short, of being brutalized by a 'holiday' that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color TV set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands."

"My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong."

"Heaven began to run at the edges."

"They did it wrong, Doc. They made mistakes. And they'll keep it this way, just because everyone wants to believe it. They don't want to know the truth, Doc. It's easier for everyone this way. If enough people believe the fantasy, well, then it becomes the reality. But we know, Doc. We know who belongs where, don't we?"

"Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to purée of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!" Auditorium monitors moved in, truncheons ready to club down anyone foolish enough to try jumping the lecture platform; and finally there was relative silence. And I heard scattered voices screaming from the back of the room, "Who? And I said, "Yes. Who!"

"Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver."

"Hey, gang!" I squeaked in my terrifically accurate Mickey voice. "Everybody ready to shoot the ultimate Disney flick? The film that rips the lid off the goody two-shoes hypocrisy that lies sweltering beneath the surface of G-rated true-life adventures? Okay, you guys, let's get that hand-held Arriflex right down there between Minnie's legs! I wanna see closeups of quivering labia!"

"Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ's sakes! … We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich". And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry! You'll make a fortune!" He says, "I'm going to do it.""

"I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad. The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us."

"What he wrote was this: The great tragedy of my life is that in my search for the Holy Grail everyone calls True Love, I see myself as Zorro, a romantic and mysterious highwayman — and the women I desire see me as Porky Pig."

"I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work. … It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me — that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game. Because my immortal soul will be lost."

"Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment."

"You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the fucking game."

"For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered."

"He was just Ron and I kinda liked him, mostly because he wrote well, and I never felt he took all that Scientology nonsense seriously but knew how to make a good buck, and he liked me, and... well, he was a friend who died."

"Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us."

"All writers in some insane place believe that to write is a holy chore — that what one wishes to do is speak to one’s time, to make a difference, to say: "I was here. I was a force for good in some way.""

"Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks."

"Even the brightest star shines dimly when observed from too far away. And human memory is notoriously unreliable. And we live in ugly times when all respect for that which has gone before suffers crib death beneath the weight of youthful arrogance and ignorance. But a great nobility has at last, been recognized and lauded. Someone less charitable than I might suggest the honor could have been better appreciated had it not been so tardy, naming its race with a foe that blots joy and destroys short-term memory. But I sing the Talent Electric, and like aft the dark smudges of history, everything but the honor and die achievement remains for the myth-makers. Alfred E. van Vogt has been awarded the Grand Master trophy of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is not the to first person to receive this singular accolade…given only to those whose right to possess it is beyond argument or mitigation. Were we in 1946 or even 1956, van Vogt would have already been able to hold the award aloft. Had SFWA existed then and had the greatest living sf authors been polled as to who was the most fecund, the most intriguing, the mast innovative the most influential of their number, Isaac and Arthur and Cyril and Hank Kuttner and Ron Hubbard would all have pointed to the same man, and Bob Heinlein would've given him a thumbs-up. Van Vogt was the pinnacle, the source of power and ideas; the writer to beat. Because he embodied in his astonishing novels and assorted stories what we always say is of prime importance to us in this genre-the much vaunted Sense of Wonder. Van Vogt was the wellspring of wonder. … That's how important he was. … And then came the dark years during which the man was shamefully agented and overlooked; and even the brightest star loses its piercing light if observed through the thickening mists of time and flawed memory. Now it is lifetimes later, and the great award has, at last, been presented. To some, less charitable than I, something could be said about a day late and a dollar short, but not I. I am here to sing the Talent Electric, and it is better now than never. He is the Grand Master, A.E. can Vogt, weaver of a thousand ideas per plot-line, creator of alien thoughts and impossible dreams that rival the best ever built by our kind. This dear, gentlemanly writer whose stories can still kill you with a concept or warm you with a character, now joins the special pantheon."

"Alfred E. van Vogt, since the appearance of his first two stories — "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" (Astounding Science Fiction, July and December 1939) the most memorable debut in the long history of the genre — has been a giant. The words seminal and germinal leap to mind. Sadly, at this juncture. the words tragedy and farewell also insinuate themselves. … Van is still with us, as I write this, in June of 1999, slightly less than fifty years since I first encountered van Vogt prose in a January 1950 issue of Startling Stories, but Van is gone. He is no longer with us. … Because the great and fecund mind of A.E. van Vogt has fallen into the clutches of that pulp thriller demon, Alzheimer's. Van is gone. … Anyone's demise or vanishment is in some small way tragic but the word "tragedy" requires greater measure for its use. … Van' s great mind now gone. Tragedy. The ultimate tragic impropriety visited on as good a man as ever lived. A gentle. soft spoken man who was filled with ideas and humor and courtesy and kindness. Not even those who were not aficionados of Van's writing could muster a harsh word about him as a human being. He was as he remains now, quietly and purposefully, a gentleman. But make no mistake about this: the last few decades for him were marred by the perfidious and even mean spirited and sometimes criminal acts of poltroons and self-aggrandizing mountebanks and piss-ants into whose clutches he fell just before the thug Alzheimer got him. … I came late to the friendship with Van and Lydia. Perhaps only twenty-five or so years. But the friendship continues, and at least I was able to make enough noise to get Van the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, which was presented to him in full ceremony during one of the last moments when he was cogent and clearheaded enough understand that finally, as last, dragged kicking and screaming to honor him, the generation that learned from what he did and what he had created had, at last, fessed up to his importance. Naturally, others took credit for his getting the award. They postured and spewed all the right platitudes. Some of them were the same ones who had said to me — during the five years it took to get them to act honorably — "we'd have given it to him sooner if you hadn't made such a fuss." Yeah. Sure. And pandas'll fly out of my ass."

"NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. (I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are..." (Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke."

"I don't own a computer, or a modem, or anything like that; I still work on a manual typewriter, by choice, and to those who consider me a Luddite I say: Fuck you and yo mama. I operate at the level of technology that best suits my needs. And I type at 120 words per minute — two fingers — I make no mistakes, and my manuscripts are real. You can pick them up and hold them. My typewriter doesn't dump its memory — I don't lose a book."

"Art is not supposed to be easier! There are a lot of things in life that are supposed to be easier. Ridding the world of heart attacks, making the roads smoother, making old people more comfortable in the winter, but not Art. Art should always be tough. Art should demand something of you. Art should involve foot-pounds of energy being expended. It's not supposed to be easier, and those who want it easier should not be artists. They should be out selling public relations copy."

"He had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life."

"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer."

"Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times ALREADY – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching."

"If I had to pick a religion, I'd pick Buddhism. Buddhism is a kindly religion. It says you got a chance... it's got humor, it's got wisdom, it says to be nice to each other. All the rest of them have gods that want to beat the crap out of you if you defy the rules."

"And my mother said—and I remember this as if it were yesterday—my mother with a washcloth in her hand and me standing at the sink, she said, "You must have said something to get them angry." And it was an icicle just jammed into my chest. That my own mother—and with cause! It was not as if I was the greatest kid in the world. I was a troublemaker! I was a brat! I was a big-mouth pain in the ass! But that my own mother would not understand—at that moment I had what, now at age seventy-two I understand, was an enormous epiphany, which is: I really cannot support it, I cannot bear it, when people laugh at me."

"It’s not often people will tell you how they really feel about gut-level things. Like god or how they’re afraid they’ll go insane like their grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are when you pick your nose and wipe it on your pants. They play cozy with you, because nobody likes to be hated, and large doses of truth from any one mouth tend to make the wearer of the mouth persona non grata."

"Over the last few years I’ve been telling science fiction fandom that they are The Establishment in this genre, and for my pains I’ve amassed a truly impressive following of people who loathe, hate and despise me."

"In me own humble way, for the last few years, I’ve been trying to do an Ombudsman’s job in speculative fiction. I’ve been trying to tell a little truth to people who choose to believe rumor, gossip, non sequiturs and outright insanity, rather than dealing with reality."

"I no longer indulge in those time-wasting amateurisms called “fanning”; I decided if I was going to be a writer, I had to go ahead and ignore all the silverfish in the paperwork. And that meant no more fan magazine writing, no more convention attending, no more getting caught up in the moronic time-cannibalizing feuds many fans need to sustain their mingy little lives."

"Traditionally, in this country more than anywhere else, we have judged that the simple man, the hard-working man of the earth or the assembly line is the backbone of our morality. That it is he who will save us in times of stress. Well, that’s as outdated a philosophy as believing blacks all love watermelon."

"The day of the Common Man is past. We must be, each one of us, Renaissance Man. We must be sharp and quick and wise and kind and tough. And the boob opinion is no longer good enough. No, dingdong, you’re not entitled to your opinion, if it’s an over-the-edge opinion that makes you blind to the truth and makes you operate off faulty information."

"No God is sane. How could it be? To be a Man is so much less taxing, and most men are mad. Consider the God. How much more deranged the Gods must be, merely to exist. There can be no doubt: consider the universe and the patterns without reason upon which it is run. God is mad. The God of Music is mad. The Timegod is punctual, but he is mad. And the Machine God is mad. He has made the bomb and the pill and the missile and the acid and the electric chair and the laser and the embalming fluid and the thalidomide baby in his own image."

"How very much like a native of Earth this creature was. Governed by its stomach and a will to survive. A religion founded in fear and nurtured on terror."

"It was gibberish, but it was a deep gibberish, and if he kept talking, the beast would shuck off the thoughts rather than try to fathom them."

"In every successful production, whether television or feature film, the presence of one strong man can be seen: whether the head actor, or the head writer, or the director, or the producer, if there is one man with balls enough to swing his weight in the cause of artistic integrity, what emerges, nine times out of 9.89, is worth viewing, while the reverse proportion holds for those efforts born of Art by Committee Decision."

"The producer who is the sole concern is “product” is doomed merely to make money. Pause, while the fat-cats chuckle on their way to the bank. Yeah, we know that bit. Nice talking to you, fellas. Move on, so we can get back to the business of creating, as opposed to producing."

"Since the first night of Man, hunkered down hairy and hungry by the primeval lightning-borne food fire, fear has been the prime mover. Forget momma love and posterity and men’s unquenchable curiosity. Fear is the principle mode of locomotion of homo sapiens."

"He thought he could make intelligent films for intelligent people. This is a concept largely ignored in Hollywood, these days, the producers of the Stanley Shapiro/Ross Hunter cadre, who make movies as intellectually demanding as a Giant Golden Book, and who seemingly visualize their audiences as microcephalics fit only to salivate over the constantly-imminent deflowering of Doris Day, or the shade of puce in a Jean Louis gown."

"It hardly needs more demonstration than a flicking on of the TV set to prove that if left to its own devices, the taste of the mass—per Sturgeon’s Law—will inevitably sink to the lowest possible common denominator."

"Fear in the hands of a motion picture maker, like a shotgun in the hands of a baby, need not necessarily be properly aimed to make a helluva bang. But to hit the target dead-on, requires maturity and thought."

"Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. But there is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter: When belief in a god dies, the god dies. When the last acolyte renounces his faith and turns to another deity, the god ceases to be."

"Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?"

"I’m afraid I felt a straight pin of jealousy. Perfection does that to me."

"These are the sounds in the night: First, the sound of darkness, lapping at the edges of a sea of movement, itself called silence. Then, second, the fingertip-sensed sound of the cyclical movement of the universe as it gnaws its way through the dust-film called Time. And last, the animal sounds of two people making love. The moist sounds of two bodies in concert."

"There comes a point in the downward slide of the human condition when a man ceases to be a man. He may still walk erect, but it is principally a matter of skeletal arrangement, not ethics."

"This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade. Hints: remember, in chess, kings cancel each other out and cannot occupy adjacent squares, are therefore all-powerful and totally powerless, cannot affect each other, produce stalemate. Hinduism is a polytheistic religion; the sect of Atman worships the divine spark of life within Man; in effect saying, "Thou art God." Provisos of equal time are not served by one viewpoint having media access to two hundred million people in prime time while opposing viewpoints are provided with a soapbox on the corner. Not everyone tells the truth. Operational note: these sections may be taken out of numerical sequence: rearrange to suit yourself for optimum clarity. Turn over your test papers and begin."

"Frequently I will say something about the human condition that seems perfectly rational and proper to me, because I know we all share the same thoughts. Invariably, some feep in the audience will attempt to pillory me with a stunning accusation, “You only said that to shock!” My response is always the same: “You bet your ass, slushface. Of course I said it to shock you (or wrote it to shock you). I don’t know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water. I spend my life and miles of visceral material in a glorious and painful series of midnight raids against complacency. It is my lot to wake with anger every morning, to lie down at night even angrier. All in pursuit of one truth that lies at the core of every jot of fiction ever written: we are all in the same skin…but for the time it takes to read the stories I merely have the mouth.”"

"You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness of simply being human, or prey to the same mortal dreads. When I lecture I try to say this, to say most of the fears you invent—atomic war, multinational conspiracies, assassination paranoias, fear of ethnic types, flying saucers from Mars—those are all bullshit. I inveigh against illogical beliefs and say that the mortal dreads are the ones that drive you to crazy beliefs in Scientology, est, the power of dope, hatred of elitism and intellectual pursuits, astrology, messiahs like Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones, fundamentalist religions. I try to tell you that fear is okay if you understand that what you fear is the same for everyone. Not the bogus oogie-boogie scares of Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott’s Alien, slavering creatures in the darkness that want to pierce your flesh with scorpion stinger tails and ripping jaws, but the fear of Gregor Samsa waking to discover he isn’t who he was when he went to bed; the fear of Pip in the graveyard; the fear of Huck finding his dead father on the abandoned houseboat. The fears to which we are all heir to simply because we are tiny creatures in the universe that is neither benign nor malign…it is simply enormous and unaware of us save as part of the chain of life."

"The Real World exists utterly in the Now; in a present time that seems to find the dearly remembered Past abhorrent, unbearable. And so, as this story contends, the Present tries to eradicate the Past. Please note that a distinction is drawn between change and eradication this is not one of those embalmed adorations of nostalgic sentimentality. It merely suggests for your consideration that there are treasures of the Past that we seem too quickly brutally ready to dump down the incinerator of Progress. At what cost, it suggests, do we pursue the goal of being au courant?"

"I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other."

"I don’t believe there is such a thing as “divine retribution.” The universe is neither malign nor benign. It’s just there, and it’s too busy keeping itself together to balance the scales when some feep has jerked you around. I am a strong adherent of the philosophy that one must seek retribution oneself."

"There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems’ perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be assaulted daily by circumstances."

"There was Art, and there was survival, and sometimes they were mutually exclusive."

"He didn’t even like being referred to as an “author.” He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer. “An author [he said] is what you put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who gets his name on the spine of leatherbound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life…writing.”"

"He stopped and spun on her. “Do you think I’m a virgin? I’m not a virgin.” His vehemence pulled her back from the edge of boldness. “No, of course you’re not. I never thought such a thing.” Then she said, “Well…I am.” “Sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know the right thing to say, if there was a right thing. “Not your fault,” she said. Which was the right thing to say."

"“No one should ever be judged heartless because he tended to his own personal survival,” she said."

"Before I proceed, let me reiterate: I do not write diary. A writer cannibalizes his own life and memories, yes, that is true. All we have to work with is what we know and what we dream. But nothing is more boring than kvetching in fiction. Thinly disguised personal reminiscence is not fiction. Those who, in the past, have identified me with everything that goes down in my stories have assumed I am a murderer, a transvestite, a cannibal, a sexist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, an elitist, a vegetarian, an esthete, a commoner, a psychopath, a pacifist, a pederast, a womanizer, a layabout and a workaholic. Despite the fact that I have never used drugs, there is a large segment of my readership that swears I’m a heavy doper."

"When you’re alone, as a writer is alone, locked in single combat with the imagination, allies are rare and special."

"Carefully avoiding her gaze, he said, “What is this, Jerri? Christ, isn’t there enough crap in the world without detouring to find a fresh supply?” He said it softly, because he had said I love you to her for two years, excluding the final seven months when he had said fuck off, never realizing they were the same phrase."

"There are no rules. Those who are in power make up the rules. So those out of favor are bound to break them."

"Michelangelo gave them each a shove. Off the short dock. They sank without a ripple, borne to the infinite bottom by the weight of their severity, the heft of their sententiousness, the freighting of pecksniffian nit-picking that stuffed their otherwise wooly heads. They went straight to the bottom, wherever that was, down and down, leaving behind only a funnel of bubbles, the last of the hot air they contained."

"What it means is: the fucking Nazis are with us again. Skinheads. David Duke. In France, Jacques Chirac…and Jean-Marie Le Pen—demagogic leader of the neo-Nazi mouthpiece group, the Nationalist Front Party. Istvan Porubsky, the racist thug of Hungary. Benito’s granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini had her Italian Social Movement. Pamyat in Russia and the Ku Klux Klan at Rulo Farm, Nebraska. Klas Lund, the 23-year-old convicted Nazi killer, leader of Sweden’s underground White Aryan Resistance, known as VAM. The British thug Ian Stuart Donaldson and his Nazi Blood and Honour Brigade. Alejandro Biodini and his anti-Semitic Argentinian Nationalist Workers’ Party. Gerhard Frey’s neo-Nazi Deutsche Volks Union; the notorious Nazi and historical revisionist Walter Ochsenberger in Austria; the 52-year-old German-Canadian anti-Semite, Nazi, and “Auschwitz liar” Ernst Zündel. Tom Metzger. The Church of the Creator. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman (“The estimate of Holocaust victims is based on biased testimony and exaggerated data”) and U.S. Presidential candidate for the Republican nomination, right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, beloved of the television camera’s eye, who put forth the certain theory that the Zyklon-B gas chambers at Treblinka couldn’t have functioned as “a killing apparatus.” Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus. Fourth Reich skinheads. What it means is: the proper names change but the drooling lunacy is self-perpetuating. Anti-Semitism. What historian Robert S. Wistrich calls a “miasma of nightmarish paranoia, millennial fantasy, homicidal hatred and sheer political cynicism…Free-floating anti-Semitism, for which the actual presence of Jews is almost immaterial, thrives on archetypal fears, anxieties and reflexes that seem to defy any rational analysis.” What my story means is: one cannot hide, one cannot rest, one cannot relax or seek salvation in anonymity or the good offices of gods who may or may not wear their true faces. What it means is: The Nazis are with us again. Still. Yet. They never went away. And with the spread of cultural illiteracy, historical amnesia, mass communications obfuscation…their puke-coated message is out there once again. For thirty years, they had to keep their rotten bigotry to themselves, but with the passing of time they have emerged into the light, to poison the generations of rock’n’roll that have about as much of a sense of the past as a ground-worm. They can say anything, pass off any kind of obscurantism or illiterate lunacy—like UFO abductees—and there will always be dopes and jerks and illiterates and brain-damage cases who give what they cobble up some credence."

"Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them." "I—" started Griffin, but the wizard cut him off with a blink. "No, listen, please, because after this, all the magic stops, and you have to do it alone. “You create your own Heaven, and you have the opportunity to live in it, but you have to do it on your own terms, the highest terms of which you are capable. So sail this ship through the straits, navigate the shoals, find the island, overcome the foam-devil that guards the girl, win her love, and you’ve played the game on your own terms."

"Griffin stood silently, watching the waterfall, sensing more than he saw, understanding more than even his senses could tell him. This was, indeed, the Heaven of his dreams, a place to spend the rest of forever, with the wind and the water and the world another place, another level of sensing, another bad dream conjured many long times before. This was reality, an only reality for a man whose existence had been not quite bad, merely insufficient, tenable but hardly enriching. For a man who had lived a life of not quite enough, this was all there ever could be of goodness and brilliance and light. Griffin moved toward the falls. The darkness grew darker."

"Empty winds howled down out of the tundras of his soul. This was the charnel house of his finest fantasies. The burial ground of his forever. The garbage dump, the slain meat, the putrefying reality of his dreams and his Heaven. Griffin stumbled away from her, hearing the shrieks of men needlessly drowned by his vanity, hearing the voiceless accusation of the devil proclaiming cowardice, hearing the orgasm-condemnation of lust that was never love, of brute desire that was never affection, and realizing at last that these were the real substances of his nature, the true faces of his sins, the marks in the ledger of a life he had never led, yet had worshipped silently at an altar of evil. All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night."

"When they dug the body out of the alley, it made even the hardened construction workers and emergency squad cops ill. Not one bone was left unbroken. The very flesh seemed to have been masticated as if by a nation of cannibal dogs. Even so, the three inured excavators who finally used winding sheets and shovels to bring the shapeless mess up from its five-foot grave agreed that it was incredible, totally past belief, that the head and face were untouched. And they all agreed that the expression on the face was not one of happiness. There were many possible explanations for that expression, but no one would have said terror, for it was not terror. They would not have said helplessness, for it was not that, either. They might have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said, with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams."

"It is my hope that all of you who walk down the street with an iPod plugged into your head are hit by a Seven Santini Brothers moving van. I look down on a lot of you … not because you’re not terrific people, but because you’re not stupid, you’re ignorant. Big difference. Ignorance is never having seen a film by Akira Kurosawa. It’s not knowing who Guy de Maupassant is. …By the way if I miss, during the evening, saying something offensive to you, insulting your sexual proclivity, your physical disability, your race, your religion, your sex, anything, please, raise your hand. I’ll get to you, I promise. I’ll say something really nasty."

"I’ve been on my own since I was 13. I grew up having to use my wits. My parents were not wealthy. We weren’t poor, but we had a lot of meals with noodles. I was born during the Depression. My parents died pretty much penniless. Every dollar I’ve ever made I earned myself. I don’t believe in luck. Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." The smarter you are, the more you know, the better. I was the only Jew in town and I was my generation’s Bart Simpson. I knew the world could be mine."

"I go to bed angry every night, I wake up angry every morning. There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all! I fight them all because you never know which one is the big one. You never know which you give up and then it will come back and bite you in the ass. You never look away from a mountain lion, you lock eyes and you don’t let him get behind you."

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

"Harlan is a giant among men in courage, pugnacity, loquacity, wit, charm, intelligence — indeed in everything but height."

"Harlan Ellison was a major influence, particularly his short story collection Dangerous Visions."

"I had one very good teacher who is also a writer, Harlan Ellison. He gave me a lot of help and a hard push or two when I needed them. It so happens that he writes a lot of fantasy and science fiction and was able to give me the kind of help I wouldn't have received from some English teacher."

"I remember getting into Harlan Ellison's class and at one point having him say, science fiction fans read too much science fiction; and he was no doubt right, but as an adolescent that was all I read except for school work."

"I was in classes sometimes where I was the only Black person and tend to either get ignored or get petted on the head a lot. Neither is in the slightest useful so I was eager to get away from that and Harlan was not interested in doing either."

"They say you should never meet your heroes, and I tell you whoever said that had lousy heroes. Well, the few of you reading this fortunate enough to know Harlan know that if you scheduled a call with him, you called immediately at the specified time. Not one minute before, not one minute after. You called right. On. Time. One day I did not. Harlan read me the riot act and demanded to know what was so fucking important that I made him wait twenty minutes for me. I revealed to him that I’d discovered that day that the woman who was my geek Yoda in high school, the girl who had introduced me to numerous films, books, and video games and had been the one who put Harlan's own books into my hands for the very first time, had died at all too young an age. In that moment Harlan became one of the most gentle souls I've ever spoken with. “Oh, kid,” he said somberly, “do I ever know how that feels.” Then he consoled me for an hour, asking about her, talking at length what it was like losing Asimov and Bradbury and too many countless others. Then he revealed to me his greatest fear: that though he outlived his friends, he would be swallowed up by them, forgotten to the mists of time as little more than a footnote to so many other careers."

"He was demonstrating to the world the writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic."

"Ellison was immensely talented, immensely argumentative and immensely controversial, all in equal measure. … Loved or loathed, he was undeniably one of the great figures in science fiction."

"Ten minutes after the event was scheduled to begin, we heard a commotion from the street as Harlan arrived. In the years that followed, I would come to understand that Commotion is just Harlan misspelled."

"He is…colorful, intrusive, abrasive, irritating, hilarious, illogical, inconsistent, unpredictable, and one hell of a writer."

"When it came to formal classes, I was a slacker. But I've always been a diligent autodidact and can teach myself virtually any subject — if I have a serious interest in it."

"You've got to stay sharp, on your toes, alert. Always look over your shoulder. Always protect yourself. Don't let your guard down for even a second. There are people who will take advantage of you the moment they see you're not in control. The world's filled with people like that. Nearly everyone you meet is like that. We're animals in a jungle, and we've got to be prepared to fight if we want to survive. You can't trust hardly anyone, hardly anyone at all. Even people who are supposed to like you can turn on you faster than you think. Even friends. People who say they love you are the worst, the most dangerous, the most untrustworthy of all. People who say they love you will pounce when they get the chance. You gotta always remember that they're just waiting for the opportunity to get you. Love's a trick. A cover. A way to catch you off guard. Never let down your guard. Never."

"It's so damn hard to bloom… to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without… love."

"Did you get the leash on him yet, Einstein?"

"Evidently, Ted had walked down the block from his own house and entered with the intention of fixing something. Now Ted was broken, too, and beyond repair."

"As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather… the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it — very loose, the line of the law — so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always — short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder — safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true."

"… mankind has no right to employ its genius in the creation of another intelligent species, then treat it like property. If we've come so far that we can create as God creates, then we have to learn to act with the justice and mercy of God."

"I thought of you as my guardian, Einstein… you taught me that I'm your guardian, too, that I'm Travis's guardian, and he is my guardian and yours. We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another, we are watchers, all of us, watchers, guarding against the darkness. You've taught me that we're all needed, even those who sometimes think we're worthless, plain, and dull."

"In a crunch a man's reputation never counts for as much as it ought to. Most people are good-hearted and willing to give a man the benefit of the doubt, but the poisonous few are eager to see others brought down, ruined. … Envy, Bob. Envy eats them alive. If you had money, they'd envy you that. But since you don't, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others."

"Maybe Nina wouldn't have died if I hadn't moved in with them and drawn Sheener after me, but I can't feel guilty about that. I tried hard to be a good foster daughter to them, and they were happy with me. What happened was that life dropped a big custard pie on us, and that's not my fault; you can never see the custard pies coming. It's not good slapstick if you see the pie coming." "Custard pie?" he asked, perplexed. "You see life as a slapstick comedy? Like the Three Stooges?" "Partly." "Life is just a joke then?" "No. Life is serious and a joke at the same time." "But how can that be?" "If you don't know," she said, "maybe I should be the one asking the questions here."

"But there are two things that different kinds of people believe that are the worst, most dangerous, wrongest of all. Some people believe that the best way to solve a problem is with violence; they beat up or kill anyone who disagrees with them." … "But what's the other worst kind of bad thinking?" "Pacifism," she said. "That's just the opposite of the first kind of bad thinking. Pacificists believe that you should never lift a hand against another human being, no matter what he has done or what you know he's going to do." … "Some pacificists are cowards in disguise, but some really believe it's right to permit the murder of an innocent person rather than kill to stop it. They're wrong because by not fighting evil, they've become part of it."

"They can hopscotch around us," Chris told Laura. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like… if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic."

"A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in."

"How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It's like playing blackjack when the dealer is God. … Come to think of it, all of life is a blackjack game with God as the dealer, isn't it? So this is no worse."

"Your sense of responsibility to others can never be excessive."

"Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall near the refrigerator. The first displayed each kid's grades and major test results since the start of the school year in September. The other was a list of household chores for which each child was responsible. … Some attributed Asian-Americans' success to a conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They tried harder. They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been based — including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented self-denial, and the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be. Ironically, their great success was partly due to the fact that so many born Americans had become cynical about those same ideals."

"The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut."

"In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart."

"Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid."

"He considered himself to be a thoroughly useless man, taking up space in a world to which he contributed nothing — but he did have a talent for baking… The gas oven might blow up in his face, at last bringing him peace, but if it didn't, he would at least have cookies for Agnes."

"When we don't allow ourselves to hope, we don't allow ourselves to have purpose. Without purpose, without meaning, life is dark. We've no light within, and we're just living to die."

"He's a hollow man. He believes in anything. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty."

"When you're as hollow as Enoch Kane, the emptiness aches. He's desperate to fill it, but he doesn't have the patience or the commitment to fill it with anything worthwhile… So a man like Kane obsesses on one thing after another — sex, money, food, power, drugs, alcohol — anything that seems to give meaning to his days, but that requires no real self-discovery or self-sacrifice."

"The cheerful tides of friends and neighbors, over the years, had washed away nearly all the stains that the dark rage Agne’s father had impressed on these rooms. She hoped her brothers might eventually see that hatred and anger are only scars upon a beach, while love is the rolling surf that ceaselessly smooths the sand."

"I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants […] Fear implies respect."

"Change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think. Changing the way you think means changing what you believe about life. That's hard, sweetie. When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable."

"There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?"

"What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven? […] If your heart is closed, then you will find behind that door nothing to light your way. But if your heart is open, you will find behind that door people who, like you, are searching, and you will find the right door together with them. None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light."

"Dylan… said, "Both Becky and Kenny need medical attention—" "And a prison cell until their social security kicks in," Jilly added. "—but give us two or three minutes before you call 9-1-1," Dylan finished. This instruction baffled Marj. "But you are 9-1-1." Jilly fielded that peculiar question: "We're one of the ones, Marj, but we're not the other one or the nine.""

"Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as "a cheerful, child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children." Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric. Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings?"

"Dr. Bob managed so successfully to turn the answer to every question into a mini-lecture on self-esteem and positive thinking, that Ethan wanted Hazard to arrest him on charges of Felony Cliché and Practicing Philosophy Without An Idea."

"My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist."

"In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion."

"Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it."

"She said, "Love isn't enough. Your parents have to know how to relate to you, and to each other. They have to want to be with you more than with anyone else. They have to love being home more than anywhere in the world, and they have to be more interested in you than in…" "Snakes and tornadoes," I suggested. "God, I love them. They're nice, Jimmy, they really are, and they mean well. But they live inside themselves more than not, and they keep their doors closed. You see them mostly through windows.""

"Where there's cake, there's hope. And there's always cake."

"Blizzards, floods, volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us."

"For most of her existence, Molly had not shied from a truth that most people understood but diligently suppressed: that every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature."

"Sometimes," I said, "it seems to me that a friend might not take such pleasure in making fun of me as you do." "Dear Odd! If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not, in fact, his friends. How else would one learn to avoid saying those things that would elicit laughter from strangers? The mockery of friends is affectionate, and inoculates against foolishness."

"Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused."

"Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity. Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption."

"… less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U.S. Senator with an idea."

"Sheep were docile, yes, but vigilant. Unlike many people, sheep were always aware that predators existed and were alert for the scent and the schemes of wolves. Contemporary Americans were so proseperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog."

"In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable."

"Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts"."

"Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go." "Which is where?" "To a responsible future in a properly managed world."

"This book, maybe as good as I can get, is for Dean Koontz, whose portrait, in The Oxford Universal Dictionary, appears contiguous with the definition of the word "mensch." (see also: Guy, stand-up.)"

"I'm not an "American First" (and maybe because I read science fiction) I'm a "Terran First". I'm a human being first. And I have this sympathy for other human beings no matter what side of the giant ice wall they happen to be born on."

"Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the crudest is the one called love."

"Been on the river thirty years, York. Rafted down to New Orleans when I was just a boy, and worked flatboats and keelboats both before steamers. I been a pilot and a mate and a striker, even a mud clerk. Been everything there is to be in this business, but one thing I never been, and that's a sharper."

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real... for a moment at least... that long magic moment before we wake. Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smoke-stacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever, somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to Middle Earth."

"Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends."

"Back at the Philadelphia Worldcon (which seems a million years ago), I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons. I started out writing on that basis in 2001, and it worked very well for some of my myriad characters but not at all for others, because you can't just have nothing happen for five years. If things do happen you have to write flashbacks, a lot of internal retrospection, and that's not a good way to present it. I struggled with that essentially wrong direction for about a year before finally throwing it out, realizing there had to be another interim book. That became A Feast for Crows, where the action is pretty much continuous from the preceding book. Even so, that only accounts for one year. Why the four after that? I don't know, except that this was a very tough book to write -- and it remains so, because I've only finished half. Going in, I thought I could do something about the length of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, roughly 1,200 pages in manuscript. But I passed that and there was a lot more to write. Then I passed the length of the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was something like 1,500 pages in manuscript and gave my publishers all around the world lots of production problems. I didn't really want to make any cuts because I had this huge story to tell. We started thinking about dividing it in two and doing it as A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two, but the more I thought about that the more I really did not like it. Part One would have had no resolution whatsoever for 18 viewpoint characters and their 18 stories. Of course this is all part of a huge megaseries so there is not a complete resolution yet in any of the volumes, but I try to give a certain sense of completion at the end of each volume -- that a movement of the symphony has wrapped up, so to speak."

"Sure. Some of the reviews have been very flattering, but the series is not finished yet. The end needs to be as strong as the beginning."

"I've been killing characters my entire career, maybe I'm just a bloody minded bastard, I don't know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps."

"As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books... I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you."

"There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like and where all the closets are going to be, where the plumbing is going to run, and everything is figured out on the blueprints before they actually begin any work whatsoever. And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they've planted — whether it's an oak or an elm, or a horror story or a science fiction story, but they don't how big it's going to be, or what shape it's going to take. I am much more a gardener than an architect."

"I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction."

"Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be."

"Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him."

"My reading of history has shown me that simply 'being a good man' is not enough. That there are many kings who are good men and yet bad kings. And even good kings sometimes make disastrous decisions. So government is complex, politics is complex."

"Believe me, no one wants to finish this book more than me."

"With great power comes great responsibility, Stan Lee once wrote. Spidey's credo articulates the basic premise of every superhero universe, including ours. But Lord Acton wrote that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The tension between those two truths is where the drama comes in. My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight."

"I hear you jeering. Pfui. Those of you who know my work only from A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE may not be aware that I was once considered the most romantic science fiction writer of the 70s, back when I was doing my Thousand Worlds stuff."

"The House of Fantasy is built of stone and wood and furnished in High Medieval. Its people travel by horse and galley, fight with sword and spell and battle-axe, communicate by palantir or raven, and break bread with elves and dragons. The House of Science Fiction is built of duralloy and plastic and furnished in Faux Future. Its people travel by starship and aircar, fight with nukes and tailored germs, communicate by ansible and laser, and break protein bars with aliens. The House of Horror is built of bone and cobwebs and furnished in Ghastly Gothick. Its people travel only by night, fight with anything that will kill messily, communicate in screams and shrieks and gibbers, and sip blood with vampires and werewolves."

"Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories."

"The battle between Good and Evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and... they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this became cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators."

"Much as I admire Tolkien, and I do admire Tolkien — he’s been a huge influence on me, and his Lord of the Rings is the mountain that leans over every other fantasy written since and shaped all of modern fantasy — there are things about it, the whole concept of the Dark Lord, and good guys battling bad guys, Good versus Evil, while brilliantly handled in Tolkien, in the hands of many Tolkien successors, it has become kind of a cartoon. We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need any more, ‘Here are the good guys, they’re in white, there are the bad guys, they’re in black. And also, they’re really ugly, the bad guys. It is certainly a genuine, legitimate topic as the core of fantasy, but I think the battle between Good and Evil is waged within the individual human hearts. We all have good in us and we all have evil in us, and we may do a wonderful good act on Tuesday and a horrible, selfish, bad act on Wednesday, and to me, that’s the great human drama of fiction. I believe in gray characters, as I’ve said before. We all have good and evil in us and there are very few pure paragons and there are very few orcs. A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at."

"Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check and then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children had just been gassed, with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed."

"I think worship of death is an interesting basis for religion, because after all death is the one universal. It doesn't seem to matter what gods you pray to. We all die, in the real world and in fantasy worlds, and if there was some religion where you did not die I suspect that would be, that god would become very popular. They all promise us eternal life, but whatever."

"I always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, “Fly, you fools.” What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead."

"I think even during the campaign I said that Trump reminded me most of Joffrey. They have the same level of emotional maturity. And Joffrey likes to remind everyone that he's king. And he thinks that gives him the ability to do anything. And we're not an absolute monarchy, like Westeros is. We're a constitutional republic. And yet, Trump doesn't seem to know what that means. He thinks the presidency gives him the power to do anything. And so, yeah, Joffrey is Trump."

"I was always intensely Romantic, even when I was too young to understand what that meant. But Romanticism has its dark side, as any Romantic soon discovers... which is where the melancholy comes in, I suppose. I don't know if this is a matter of artistic influences so much as it is of temperament. But there's always been something in a twilight that moves me, and a sunset speaks to me in a way that no sunrise ever has."

"Historical processes have never much interested me, but history is full of stories, full of triumph and tragedy and battles won and lost. It is the people who speak to me, the men and women who once lived and loved and dreamed and grieved, just as we do. Though some may have had crowns on their heads or blood on their hands, in the end they were not so different from you and me, and therein lies their fascination. I suppose I am still a believer in the now unfashionable "heroic" school, which says that history is shaped by individual men and women and the choices that they make, by deeds glorious and terrible."

"The battle between good and evil is a legitimate theme for a Fantasy (or for any work of fiction, for that matter), but in real life that battle is fought chiefly in the individual human heart. Too many contemporary Fantasies take the easy way out by externalizing the struggle, so the heroic protagonists need only smite the evil minions of the dark power to win the day. And you can tell the evil minions, because they're inevitably ugly and they all wear black. I wanted to stand much of that on its head. In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which."

"I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this: George R. R. Martin is not your bitch. This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now. People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines."

"I saw Mr. Martin at Worldcon last year. And I almost went up to him and asked, “How have you gone this long without killing someone?” Because however much flak I happen to get from fans, he has to get a thousand times more. In my opinion, he's a saint. If I had to deal with that level of fan dickishness, I would have already lost my shit in some spectacular way. There would be a video of me on youtube, gone all berserk with nerd rage, holding someone up by the neck, shouting "I've got your sequel right here, bitch!""

"Whenever we got to a George R. R. Martin script, you realized no one thinks like this guy. If the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ staff was a jazz quintet, George R. R. Martin was like John Coltrane, because he plays a solo and you go, ‘How did he do that? How did that juxtaposition of notes ever come into anybody’s head?’ George’s stuff was fluid and funky, weird and kinky, but also had this gravitas, this profound thought, that gave it weight and import. He’s one of the really, really good guys."

"It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game."

"I had been too long away from the nobility; I had forgotten how silly even the best of them could be."

"I hate to waste a really good threat."

"You will never lose your nerve. Your life, probably, but never your nerve.""

"I won't die, eaten alive," he said. He put a fresh clip in his gun. I'll do you first if you want, or you can do it yourself. Save your bullets, Edward. I lifted a can of gasoline in one hand. What are you planning? he asked. I'm going to set the shed on fire. I splashed gasoline on the door. The smell was sharp and tugged at the back of my throat. With us inside? he asked. Yes. I'd rather shoot myself, if it's all the same to you."

"I know who and what I am. I am The Executioner, and I don't date Vampires. I kill them."

"I could almost smell her fear... Why did it bother me so much? Because she and I were the only women here, and we had to be better than the men. Braver, quicker, whatever. It was a rule for playing with the big boys."

"My eyes were running because there were pieces of zombie all over my toys, Jesus."

"People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when the knowledge is so damn frightening."

"Pretend hard enough and maybe it will go away."

"Always needing to have the last word is a bad trait Ms. Blake, pisses people off."

"I stepped out of the car on the rat king's arm, like a trophy wife--except for the wrist sheaths and the two folding knives hidden in my clothing. Somehow I think trophy wives wear more makeup and less cutlery. But, Hey, I haven't met a trophy wife, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they know what I know, that the true way to a man's heart is six inches of metal between his ribs. Sometimes four inches will do the job, but to be really sure, I like to have six. Funny how phallic objects are always more useful the bigger they are. Anyone who tells you size doesn't matter has been seeing too many small knives."

"We hate most in others what we dislike in ourselves."

"Giving up something that no longer serves a purpose, or protects you, or helps you, isn't giving up at all, it's growing up."

"He wanted to feed the hunger of his skin. The hunger of his body not so much for orgasm but for that need to be held close and tight, that need we all have to press our nakedness against someone else's."

"You ask yourself "What is love? Am I in love?", when what you should be asking is, "What is not love?", ma petite. What is it that this man does for you that is not done out of love?"

"No, really, Ronnie, it's good to share information when you know someone else is dating the lunarly challenged."

"Anita: My life works for me right now, but it wouldn't work for a child. Ronnie: Why, because you don't have a husband? Anita: No, because people try to kill me on a semiregular basis."

"A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were."

"There comes a point when you just love someone. Not because they're good, or bad, or anything really. You just love them. It doesn't mean you'll be together forever. It doesn't mean you won't hurt each other. It just mean you love them. Sometimes in spite of who they are, and sometimes because of who they are. And you know that they love you, sometimes because of who you are, and sometimes in spite of it."

"Nothing helps you sleep at night so much as being absolutely certain that you're right, and everyone else is evil."

"There's no one so self-righteous as someone policing someone else's morality."

"I smiled at him but knew it did not reach my eyes. I smiled because he smiled at me, more reflex than emotion. Inside I was nothing. It was a little like being in shock. Shock is nature's insulation, the thing that shuts you down so you can heal, or sometimes so you can die without hurting, or being afraid..."

"Well I wasn't going to die. You didn't die of a broken heart, it just felt like you were going to. I knew from personal experience that if you just kept moving, acting as if you weren't bleeding inside you didn't die, and eventually you stopped wanting to."

"[Talking to friend Veronica, Anita Blake worries she may be pregnant.] Ronnie: I could ask, who's the father, but that's just creepy. If you are, then it's this little tiny, microscopic lump of cells. It's not a baby. It's not a person, not yet. Anita: We'll have to disagree on that one. Ronnie: You're pro-choice. Anita: Yep, I am, but I also believe that abortion is taking a life. I agree women have the right to choose, but I also think that it's still taking a life. Ronnie: That's like saying you're pro-choice and pro-life. You can't be both. Anita: I'm pro-choice because I've never been a fourteen-year-old incest victim pregnant by her father, or a woman who's going to die if the pregnancy continues, or a rape victim, or even a teenager who made a mistake. I want women to have choices, but I also believe that it's a life, especially once it's big enough to live outside the womb."

"Samuel smiled at me. "Freedom and fairness are very important to you, aren't they?" I nodded, and frowned. "They're important to everybody." He laughed. "Oh, no, Anita, you would be amazed at the number of people who try to give away their freedom at every opportunity. They much prefer that someone else make their decisions.""

"The idea of the feudal system is that the people on the top take care of the needs of those on the bottom, but I have seldom seen it work that way," Wicked said. "Yeah," I said, "it's like trickle-down economics; it only works if the people at the top are really good, decent people. The system is only as good as the people in power."

"Maybe God isn't the sex police, Richard. Sometimes I think Christians get all hung up on the sex thing because it's easier to worry about sex than to ask yourself, am I a good person? If as long as you don't have sex with a lot of people, that's easy. […] It makes it easy to be cruel, because as long as you're not fucking around, nothing you do can be that bad. Is that really all you think of God?"

"That feeling of terrible emptiness when I touched him was like going into a house that you thought would be full of people you loved, only to find it empty, and even the furniture taken. You walk from room to room, hearing your footsteps echo on the naked floors. Your voice bounces back from the empty walls, where the lines of beloved photos still show like the line around a body at a crime scene. He was gone."

"You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death."

"Love is too precious to be ashamed of."

"A flower may be beautiful all on its own, but a person is never truly beautiful unless someone's eyes show him that he is beautiful."

"After a good, successful torture, she was as happy as I ever saw her. I guess everyone needed a hobby."

""What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it."But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

"This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies."

"And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is."

"It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart."

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."

"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."

"Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain."

"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends."

"[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear."

"[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright."

"Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods."

"It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings."

"I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian."

"For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. … In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

"I was so conflicted and disillusioned about organized religion that I couldn't write. … I think my writings will go on being the writings of a believer in Christ. I think I'll be less frustrated and freer to write about the full dimension of what that means. But I write metaphysical thrillers, and how this works out in fiction is always mysterious: characters confront dilemmas. The worldview of the novel is certainly optimistic and that of a believer. What character will say what, I don't know until I start writing. …. Because I had written Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, I had become a public Christian. I wanted my readers to know that I was stepping aside from organized religion and the names Christian and Christianity because I wanted to exonerate myself from the things organized religion was doing in the name of Jesus. Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love. They have become associated with hatred, persecution, attempting to abolish the separation of church and state, and trying to pressure people to vote certain ways in elections. I wanted to make it clear that I did not in any way remain complicit with those things."

""I see . . ." said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window. [first line]"

"God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms."

"People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult."

"Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!"

"Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours."

"Good? What are you talking about, 'Good'?" "That it's good, that it does some good, that there is good in it! Dear God, even if there is no meaning in this world, surely there can still be goodness! It's good to eat, to drink, to laugh, to be together!"

"The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable."

"I want to know, for example, why beauty exists," she [Gabrielle] said, "why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough."

"Doesn't matter now, devils who paint angels."

"Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past."

"To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner."

"In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art – the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases – beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden."

"I'm the Vampire Lestat. Remember me? The vampire who became a super rock star, the one who wrote the autobiography? The one with the blond hair and the blue eyes, and the insatiable desire for visibility and fame? You remember. [first line]"

"But let me be a lover in the Savage Garden with you, and the light that went out of life would come back in a great burst of glory. Out of mortal flesh I would pass into eternity. I would be one of you."

"Tell me how bad I am... it makes me feel so good. [Last line]"

"And when a strong man is sweet, even Goddesses look down from Mount Olympus."

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed."

"The Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It's about something that happened to me."

"The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect."

"Centuries ago, when I first stood on that little boulevard stage in Paris — when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause — I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last. Oh, there were other actors, worse and better; other singers; other clowns; there have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own inimitable power; each of us comes alive in his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the eye of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment I can really understand: the kind of accomplishment in which the self-this self, if you will — is utterly whole and triumphant."

"Of course I deserve it,” I said, stroking Mojo. “That’s the simplest thing about dealing with me, apparently. I always deserve the worst! The worst disloyalty, the worst betrayal, the worst abandonment! Lestat the scoundrel. Well, they have left this scoundrel entirely on his own."

"We would make our heroes shallow,” he answered, the words very slow and almost sad. “We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength."

"Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up."

"The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass."

"Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites."

"You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering."

"But reason was only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one."

"No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems."

"Oh my precocious one," she said. "You never fail to charm me. Bisexual is it, how Byronic and charming. Doesn't that double's one's chances for love? I'm so delighted."

""No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope – that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved."

"I was seven years old. What do you know when you’re seven years old? All my life, or so I thought, we’d been in the city of Alexandria, in the Street of the Carpenters, with the other Galileans, and sooner or later we were going home."

"I saw it," said James. "I saw it when he made the sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath. The teacher told him he shouldn’t do such things on the Sabbath. Jesus looked at the birds and they turned into real birds. They flew away. You saw it too. He killed Eleazer, Mother, I saw it."

"Non-fiction contains facts, fiction contains truth."

"By and large, horror fiction is the most difficult to domesticate because part of the point is that it's one step ahead – or behind – everybody else's taste. And I'm not really convinced I'd like it to change. There's something very healthy about horror fiction being always a little bit on the outside. It's the wild-dog genre."

"Every body is a book of blood; Wherever we're opened, we're red."

"Flesh is our indisputable commonality. Whatever our race, our religion, our politics we are faced every morning with the fact of our bodies. Their frailties, their demands, their desires. And yet the erotic appetites that spring from - and are expressed through - those bodies, are so often a source of bitter dissension and division. Acts that offer a glimpse of transcendence to one group are condemned by another. We are pressured from every side - by peers, by church, by state - to accept the consensual definition of taboo; though so often what excites our imaginations most is the violation of taboo."

"If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure – because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society – then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness."

"I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons."

"I've held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience."

"Memory, prophecy and fantasy the past, the future and the dreaming moment between are all one country, living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art."

"Movies are much more fascist than books. They tell you what to feel, when to feel it. Popular movies manipulate you. Music tells you when it's a sad part and when it's a happy part. You're obliged to watch them at the speed the filmmaker has created for you. That, I think, is one of the reasons why they're so popular - because you don't have to think very hard. The filmmaker has done all the thinking for you."

"One of the reasons why I don't get on with most fantasy writing - enchanted sword fantasy writing - is because I think it's emotionally untrue. People behave in very simple ways, unparadoxical ways. What I'm trying to do is bring into fantasy - as I hope I've been able to bring to horror - a certain kind of emotional realism. People have mentioned sex as being a major part of my fiction. An awful lot of horror fiction simply never contained that kind of material. Which seems to me to be extraordinary because most horror fiction is about the body in some way or other, and therefore it should be about sensuality and eroticism every bit as much as it's about corruption."

"The fact that Pinhead is a character that audiences want to watch, that women find sexy, that people have tattooed on their own bodies, I think, is perfectly extraordinary, and I'm incredibly pleased about it. I don't think an analysis of what he does in the movies ever completely illuminates the charm that the guy has."

"The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we've enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation."

"The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, "let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible." I have lingered, of course."

"Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy."

"Your average game show host on TV, for instance, doesn't believe himself to be banal. He actually thinks that he's quite interesting. And if you look at the viewing figures, so do an enormous number of people in this country."

"We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present."

"Here is a list of fearful things: The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings, The rabid bite of the dog's of war, The voice of one who went before. But most of all the mirror's gaze, which counts us out our numbered days."

"Life is short, and pleasures few, and holed the ship, and drowned the crew, But O! But O! How very blue the sea is!"

"Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that: though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world. It must be arbitrary then, the place at which we chose to embark. Somewhere between a past half forgotten and a future as yet only glimpsed."

"Lilia sighed. “Why me?” she said, still shaking. “Why should I have to tell it?” “Because you’re the best liar,” Jerichau replied with a tight smile. “You can make it true.”"

"“Believe nothing,” Apolline advised. “This woman wouldn’t know the truth if it fucked her.”"

"Among their members were some of the wealthiest individuals in the world; between them, fortunes sufficient to trade in nations. None of the seven had a name that would have meant anything to the hoi polloi—they were, like the truly mighty, anonymously great."

"True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same."

"“And us?” said the Hag. “What happens to us then? Will we be free?” “That’s what we agreed.” “We can go into extinction?” “If that’s what you want.” “More than anything,” said the Hag. “More than anything.” “There are worse things than existence,” said Immacolata. “Oh?” the Hag replied. “Can you name one?” Immacolata thought for a short while. “No,” she conceded, with a soft sigh of distress. “You may be right, sister.”"

"Of course, there was Hobart. The Inspector was probably insane, but that was all to the good. And he had one particular aspiration which Shadwell knew he might one day need to turn to his own ends. That was, to lead—as Hobart put it—a righteous crusade."

"...Take this all of you and eat it. This is my body which will be given up for you... Old words; old rituals. But they still made sound commercial sense. Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion."

"It was absurd and frustrating, to feel so much and know so little."

"Perhaps there was a natural process at work here; a means by which the mind dealt with experiences that contradicted a lifetime’s prejudices about the nature of reality. People simple forgot."

"“Shadwell?” said Suzanna. “Their beloved Prophet,” came the reply. “Beneath that show of holiness I lent him there beats a salesman’s heart.” So Shadwell was the Prophet. What a perfect irony, that the seller of encyclopedias should end up peddling hope. “It was his idea,” said the Incantatrix, “to give them a Messiah. Now they’ve got a righteous crusade, as Hobart calls it. They’re going to claim their promised land. And destroy it in the process.” “They won’t fall for this.” “They already have, sister. Holy wars are easier to start than rumors among your Kind or mine. They believe every sacred word he tells them, as though their lives depended upon it. Which in a sense they do. They’ve been conspired against and cheated—and they’re ready to tear the Fugue apart to get their hands on those responsible. Isn’t that perfect? The Fugue’ll die at the very hands of those who’ve come to save it.” “And that’s what Shadwell wants?” “He’s a man: he wants adoration.”She gazed over Suzanna’s shoulder toward the unweaving, and the Salesman, still in its midst. “And that’s what he’s got. So he’s happy.”"

"Shadwell threw down his gun, and—though he had no taste for abattoirs—forced himself to survey the carnage before him. It was, he knew, the responsibility of one aspiring to godhood never to look away. Willful ignorance was the last refuge of humanity, and that was a condition he would soon have transcended. And, when he studied the scene, it wasn’t so unbearable. He could look at the tumble of corpses and see them for the empty sacks they were."

"What the enemy believed of you was probably true, or else why were you enemies in the first place?"

"Life and wisdom. What more could anybody ask?"

"Godhood called, and he went, fleet-footed, to worship at his own altar."

"What can be imagined— —need never be lost."

"He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation. That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end were most of his tribe: it didn’t mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last. If not, there was no hope for any living thing."

"She told him she made a rule of never marrying bankers. The next day he sent flowers, and a note saying that he’d relinquished his profession."

"As to the remnants of his army—those Seerkind who’d embraced the Prophet’s visions—they’d been the authors of their own punishment, waking from their evangelical nightmare to find it had destroyed all they held dear."

"Suzanna didn’t wait for confirmation. There was no use disbelieving the worst now."

"So he believes. The truth may be more...complex."

"Always the sightseers: open-mouthed, disbelieving. There was a force for desolation loose in their midst which could consume their lives at a glance, surely they could see that? But they’d watch anyway, willing to embrace the void if it came with sufficient razzmatazz."

"There was such sanity in his voice; a politician’s sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb. This soulless certainty was more chilling than hysteria or malice."

"“Don’t be sentimental,” he chided. “Memories aren’t enough.” It was fruitless to argue the niceties of that: he was telling her that he was in pain; he didn’t want platitudes or metaphysics."

"“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Me?” she said. “I never worry. It’s all going to end badly whether I worry or not.”"

"“Are you coming?” he said. “In a moment.” “It’s now or never.” Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn’t avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure."

"Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover's work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good."

"...I have seen the future of implausible plotting, and his name is Clive Barker."

"I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

""But men still shoot each other, don't they?" I asked hopefully."

""I might go for a walk." Even to me this sounded a pedestrian thing to do."

"I caught glimpses of white-clad figures striding purposefully to and fro, heard men's voices calling each other in tones of authority and urgency, as if life had suddenly become more serious, as if battle were in prospect."

"I remember walking to the cricket ground with the team, sometimes trying to feel, and sometimes trying not to feel, that I was one of them; and the conviction I had, which comes so quickly to a boy, that nothing in the world mattered except that we should win."

"It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial."

"They know how to use chance"

"Odysseus returned at last, neither dead nor alive, somehow still attached to this ruined corpse—a spirit perhaps unwanted among spirits and forced to remain in the dead house of its body."

"Love doesn’t go away because we want it to, but remains even when it becomes a searing pain, leaving the heart a desert of bitter remorse and grief for joy, a happiness that once has been and now never could return. There had been a time when simply to touch this little bit of linen he held now so casually brought every aching moment of that love back. The sense of desolate pain-drenched loss traveled up his arm, enclosing his heart like a set of icy fingers. A time when to look upon what it held was unbearable"

"Have I your word?” “yes, you have my word. But, you don’t believe me.” “no, men’s promises to women are easily made and even more easily broken.”"

"He knew he should be furious, but he couldn’t sustain a decent rage around her. She had too much about her of the ferocious kitten. Something small and fuzzy, just learning it had claws and how to use them"

"She knew he was telling his soul what it needed to hear so that he could gather his courage to go and go what he must"

"Do you hate me so much?” “no, I can’t hate you. I wish I could, but I can’t”"

"Elin wondered, sitting in the sweat bath, what that had to do with passion or desire, and decided – nothing. It was justification. They had murdered the men and must prove, on the helpless bodies of the women, that they were truly stronger. Prove it to exhaustion… not even pleasure was in it for them"

"I like a man willing to pay the price of his pleasures"

"I was angry with you about him, furious that he so much as set eyes on you. I would rather kill you than see you lie in his arms.” “is that love then? A thing that leads to murder?” “I don’t know. In all honesty, I don’t know. You’re mine. What’s mine I keep, I rule, and give my body over to defend. I offer you my honor, and my life. That’s not an easy thing. Its within your power to break my pride, and take that life, insignificant though it is.” “you put it very simply.” “its not. Such a gift rouses strange passions, fears of treachery, and deep distrust. I’m not immune to them.” “no one told me it would be like this. Perhaps it won't go into words, what I feel for you. Its not desire, yet I love your touch, the warm softness of your flesh against mine.”"

"So easily can we destroy those things we love. Had his moment of wounded pride, his stupid frenzy, snuffed out that fragile courage? Would the strong spirit that survived so much anguish be ended as easily as this?"

"The eyes were too intense, tortured almost. He was tall, but the body was wiry rather than powerful. Nature had gifted him with a cat’s grace and lethal swiftness, rather than the raw power of a bull"

"There’s no sense crying over what can’t be changed” “that’s what people cry over, things they can’t change”"

"Women are weak, easily swayed by passion, driven by desire, lust. He lit a fire in her body, a fire that still burned, even in his absence"

"Its easier to forget a thing without a name. I’ve learned to guard my affections.” “I know, you’ve never asked mine.”"

"Know you, boy, women are like cats and must explore any new place until they are satisfied. If they don’t they become weak and vain, fretful and ill"

"One who forced another was beneath contempt. One who needed to was despised"

"Some of the captured women killed themselves. I didn’t. others yielded and learned to love their captors. I wouldn’t do either one. I knew I would escape. Death is forever; to learn to love the hand that crushes you is a shame not to be borne. Pain and slavery will pass. I believed this and it kept me alive"

"You should leave that place, my girl” “you know me better than that.” “yes, I do. Too brave for your own good. Too brave now, I think.” “would you have me any less?” “I’m sorry. No, I wouldn’t have you less.”"

"Pleasure wouldn’t exist without the sharp bite of pain. Even the brief flash of orgasm is too intense to be absolutely pleasurable"

"A hint of ‘I’m so pleased that you strong, handsome, stalwart men are going to stand between my flower-like beauty and danger,’ wouldn’t hurt either"

"I know love is eternal, so also are folly, lies and roses."

"You’re frightening me” “be frightened. Sometimes its very intelligent to be afraid”"

"Desire was only another weapon, like hunger, loneliness, and cold arrayed against him by his tormentors"

"For when women take revenge, it is with all their hearts and souls, not to mention considerable inventiveness and ingenuity"

"He is tremendously strong, she thought, and liked the idea, even as she had feared that strength when she first met him"

"He smiled at her, and she felt uncomfortable as she always did when he showed her affection as opposed to lust. Lust she expected from a man but not affection. The men in her life, her brothers and father, had not been affectionate; and lust would have been inappropriate, though she saw them direct that at other women, usually women of low rank, ripe to be used and cast aside"

"He was magnificent, and I will never forget that in that moment, I first loved him. And I never stopped loving him. I do now and always will. No one ever brought me more sorrow or pain or joy than he did. No, nothing, not even my sons, has ever outweighed the love I feel and still feel for him. And I believe – had I known what the future held for us: all the trouble, torment, battle, and grief of our lives – I still believe that I would have yielded my heart into his keeping as I did then"

"Love is important, and woman being shrewd bargainers probably know fame is not worth much. I’d much rather have something I can spend, eat, or love, thank you very much"

"She was afraid of men, with good reason, but she need not fear all of them. Cai loved her and somehow always would. But above all, she could trust him, because dishonesty wasn’t in him. Not always a good trait but a part of his nature. He kept faith without thinking about it at all. He couldn’t imagine not doing so"

"Then he turned and walked away, and I gazed after him in sorrow. “Don’t look so, girl. He’s the first to fall at your feet; he will not be the last”"

"And then he remembered that the other function of sex is punishment – men use it to humiliate women. And since turnabout is fair play, women often use it to humiliate men"

"I am no ordinary woman, and born to a different fate. I would not go whimpering."

"It is human, I think, when we encounter the marvelous to try and bring away some of it with us"

"You, why do you let me say such things when and where I shouldn’t?” “the problem is not ordering the course of your speech. Its shutting you up in the first place”"

"Good practical intelligence. Why screech when there is no one to comfort you?"

"One day she would be a formidable female, a creature to be reckoned with"

"Don’t flaunt your ignorance or try to insult me. I don’t suffer fools gladly and insults irritate me"

"I apologize.” “you aren’t sorry and don’t apologize.”"

"I wish. I don’t know what I wish. That you were less I were more, perhaps. Yes, just possibly that’s it"

"You are very lovely now and soon you will be beautiful. Ant not in an ordinary way. Youth is always beautiful, but you are like some creatures of fairy born to bring ill to mortals. Only trouble can follow such gifts"

"I saw he was now and always would be his own man"

"[he] was handsome. Just the sight of him stirred strange longings in me"

"Till we meet again, my heart awaits you.” “till we meet again, you will trouble my dreams”"

"Some men know from birth that they are expendable… they fought to won. If you did not win, you did not run either"

"the little death. What would or could be left of a human being after such an experience?"

"God, to breathe. Air. You don’t know what it means until you cannot take a breath"

"For what is a flower but life’s expressed passion for itself. Sudden and brief, but certain and eternal at the same time"

"At worst, they were vile creatures who needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. At best, such behavior shows a dangerous lack of self-control. The first business of a warrior is self-restraint"

"He said truth has a taste, and this had the taste of truth. A wolf would put it that way, but I agree it does. Some things just don’t hang together, but others do. And a lot of times when you encounter it, you say, “I don’t want this to be right, but it probably is, even though it brings me to grief.”"

"Shes direct enough"

"He was conscious that something in [his] personality bolstered his confidence and allowed him to rest, to seek peace and find it. He never game a name to it, and never spoke of it. And never, never would he have allowed himself or anyone to call it – love"

"Remember this central truth. Your enemy is there because he, too, has weighed the consequences of failure and accepts them. Play always to win, because nothing else matters"

"Thats the trouble. all i wanted was a tumble in the hay. oh, boy, i said. ill bet that cute thing is fun and games. what he doesn't know about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, i can sure teach him"

"He was, she thought, as beautiful as a young god, lying on his side among the grass and flowers"

"Everybody always knows where they stand with you, don't they?"

"Tisn't life that matters! 'Tis the courage you bring to it."

"Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world."

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things as well."

"I am asking you again to marry me as I did a fortnight ago."

"Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water."

"The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident."

"The temptation to neglect good ordinary writers, and thereby to exaggerate the importance of the unusual, is one that, even in the moment of deploring it, is hardly to be resisted. Mr. Walpole happens to be a popular as well as a good writer. A conscientious craftsman, he has produced book after book, every one of which has been in some degree robust, charming, and eminently sensible. His work exhibits, moreover, surprising versatility."

"Of the general soundness of Mr. Walpole's work I am firmly convinced. He is distinctly a man of his time. We see him grappling with the truth of things spiritual and material with his usual earnestness, and we can discern the characteristics of this acute and sympathetic explorer of human nature."

"Henry James and John Buchan praised him. Joseph Conrad, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf were kind about him. What's more, his books sold enormously well on both sides of the Atlantic, he was knighted, and he became very rich ... Yet now he has vanished completely, his books not even to be found on the back shelves of most second hand shops, dismissed as "unreadable"."

"He [Walpole] has done more than any man alive to make modern English writers, some of them struggling, some active and unsparing rivals of his own, familiar to a wider public, both in the United States and in England."

"Mr Walpole’s gift is neither for passion nor for satire, but he possesses an urbane observant humour. He has a true insight into the nature of domesticity...These are the small things in which Mr Walpole is invariably happy, and in our view it is no disparagement to a writer to say that his gift is for the small things rather than for the large."

"To my mind, the expression of divinity is in variety, and the more variable the creation, the more variable the creatures that surround us, botanical and zoological, the more chance we have to learn and to see into life itself, nature itself. If we were just human beings, living in a spaceship, with an algae farm to give us food, we would not be moved to learn nearly as many things as we are moved by living on a world, surrounded by all kinds of variety. And when I see that variety being first decimated, and then halved — and I imagine in another hundred years it may be down by 90% and there'll be only 10% of what we had when I was a child — that makes me very sad, and very despairing, because we need variety. We came from that, we were born from that, it's our world, the world in which we became what we have become."

"The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers. I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that."

"So I learned that people may be kind enough while not caring a rather."

"This led me to the thought that it might be easy to pretend to be a Seer. After all, if one pretended to have visions of the far distant future, how would anyone know if they came true or not?"

"“I tell you, lad, that men will believe if one says, ‘The Gods say…’ They will believe if one says, ‘I had a Vision…’ They will believe if one says, ‘It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold…’ But, if one says, ‘History teaches,’ then they will not believe.”"

"“My son, be schooled by me. If your people taught you when you were a child that there are monsters in the wood, you would have believed them. Then, later, if a woodsman had come and said to you, leading you among the trees, ‘See, there is nothing here but shadow and light, leaf and trunk, bird and beast. See, I show you. Look with your own eyes.’ Though you would look and see nothing, still you would believe there were monsters there. You would believe them invisible, or behind you, or hiding beneath the stones, or within the trees somehow. No matter what the woodsman said, you would believe your fear. Men always believe their fear. Only the strong, the brave, the curious—only they can overcome their fear to peer and poke and pry at life to find what is truly there…”"

"You’ve been too long in the nursery, boy. Too long with lads and dreamers and cooks. Come out, come out wherever you are! The cock crows morning, and the Great Game is toward! Play it or be swept from the board."

"“You would advise us not to worry?” “Oh, worry by all means,” said Windlow. “By all means. Yes. It sharpens the wits. A good worry does wonders for the defensive capabilities of the brain. However, I should not advise you to do without sleep.”"

"Perhaps, Someday…well. All time is full of somedays."

"Every time I began to take myself seriously, he let me know how small a vegetable I was in his particular stew."

"We of Betand do not change our laws readily, so says my father, but we interpret them to our needs."

"I trusted him as far as I could kick him up a chimney."

"“We have simply been too fearful to go into that place.” “You? Fearful?” I doubted this. “Do not mistake my arrogance for courage, my son. It is true that I am renowned for what I can do. But I am afraid of the unknown, as are most men, Gamesmen or pawns alike.”"

"They considered me a treasure beyond price until it came time to listen to me, and then I might as well have been a froglet going oh-ab, oh-ab, oh-ab in the ditches. I would like to have been involved at the center of things, but—well. It would have done no good to talk to Mavin about it. She was a tricksy one, my mother, and though I would have trusted her implicitly with my life, I would not trust her at all with my sanity."

"The knife of conscience twisted, and the serpent of guilt writhed under the knife."

"I reflected that a little taste of power could take a reasonably sensible person and make some kind of groveling, cringing thing of him."

"“I can’t believe he’s an evil man.” “Well, if you won’t believe him evil, then think of a reason why he’s not.”"

"I often have these good ideas which are as often ignored."

"He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game. It was the laws, the rules which made Gaming. It was Gaming made injustice. We can only try something new and hope that it is better."

"There are those who must find fault somewhere, among the dead if they cannot find enough among the living."

"“Forgive my mentioning it. If you are like most young men, you hate having it mentioned.” Mavin could not help laughing. “I hate having it mentioned. Yes. Perhaps…” She paused a moment before going on, “it is because young people are not that sure they are competent.” “There is always that,” agreed the Seer. “But that feeling does not necessarily diminish with age. It is merely challenged less frequently. When one has over sixty years, as I do, then the world assumes we would not have survived without competence. With someone your age, it could always be sheer luck.”"

"You have not reared him to care what others do, or think, or say. How then should he care for education, for is that not the study of what others care about?"

"“Wisdom,” growled the Agirul. “Painful, isn’t it? We assume so much and resist learning to the contrary.”"

"If one may not sleep and one may not act, then what use is there sitting about?"

"“It is hard to do good,” the voice whispered. “Nonsense,” she muttered. “You only have to do it.”"

"“Parasites,” hissed Aunt Six, just loud enough that he could not fail to hear. “No skills of their own, so they must live by preventing others from using common sense.”"

"There is a kind of animal frenzy can be whipped up sometimes among fools and children, often using religion as an excuse for it. When it happens, it is wise to be elsewhere."

"I’ll tell you, nothing is so dangerous as ambition in a man who cares not who stands in his way."

"Mavin shook her head, but withheld any judgment. If there was anything she had learned in long travels here and there, it was that to most people in the world, every unfamiliar thing was considered unacceptably strange."

"“Oh, but I am soiled beyond all cleansing.…” “Nonsense,” said Mavin impatiently. “You are silly beyond all belief, but that is your sole sin I am aware of, young man.”"

"Merced flushed. “You mock me, Messenger.” “I instruct you, Priest. Pay heed. When you believe that messengers arrive from God, it is wise to listen to everything they say, not merely when they recite accepted doctrine.” She was ashamed of herself almost immediately. He turned so pale, so wan. Well. It was only as she had suspected from the beginning. Many men had a strong tendency to tell God how to behave, and religious men were more addicted to this habit than most."

"“He is a Seer,” Mavin said sullenly, aware of her lack of logic. “Poof. Seers. Sometimes they know everything about something no one cares about. Often they know nothing about something important.”"

"“How is that possible?” “To a Wizard, anything is possible,” the Dervish said with more than a hint of scorn. “Or so they lead themselves to believe.”"

"“Every promise is like that,” she whispered to herself as she stopped counting strides for a moment. “Every promise has arms and legs and tentacles reaching off into other things and other places, strange bumps and protrusions you don’t see when you make the promise. Then you find you’ve take up some great, lumpy thing you never knew existed until you see it for the first time in the light of morning.”"

"His understanding is not great, but his sense of power and treachery is unfailing."

"I have discovered something else, Throsset of Dowes. And that is that men give women jewels when they have absolutely no idea what might please them and are not willing to take time to think about it."

"Mother, though of Gamesman caste, seemed to have no Talent of any kind. She was so beautiful she did not need to be anything else."

"Learning more was merely ordinary to me, but traveling—that was a wonderful treat. At least so I thought until we had done some of it. Then it turned out that traveling was doing everything one had to do at home with none of the conveniences for doing it."

"Mendost is not long on thinking, but he has a clear picture of himself as he believes he is."

"“And now you must decide which pain you will bear. That of being as you were. Or that of being as you are.” I brought myself up to my knees. That was as far as I could get. The hand that had held the tea cup appeared again, a full cup in it, the steam rising into my nose. I gulped it, interrupting the gulps with sobs. “Pain of being as I am? I don’t understand.” “But of course you do. The pain of curiosity unsatisfied, of ambition unfulfilled. The pain of love unreturned, of devotion undeserved. The pain of friendship rejected, of leadership ridiculed. The pain of loneliness and labor. Silly child. Did you think living was easy?”"

"“I do not like the thought of compulsion.” He shook his head at me. “Not compulsion, Jinian. Information, more like. It is as though I had been given a map which showed both the good roads and the swamps. Is it compulsion to avoid the swamps if one knows they are there?”"

"“Well, why didn’t the silly Bloomians think of that?” “Religion, I imagine, friend Chance. Religion serves to prevent thought in many cases, and I’d say it had done so here. They started with the presumption that anything as complex as the mill must exist for a good reason. Then they spent all their time inventing a good reason—and some god to be responsible for it—rather than looking for a sensible solution to their problem.”"

"This is the problem with too much Schooling. One learns to manipulate the labels in a way that the Gamesmistresses approve, and one doesn’t realize that things do not always act in accordance with the labels in the real world. One doesn’t realize that the labels, come to that, are often wrong."

"“The old ones, Ganver and the rest, they pretend it has significance. Oh, I recall that pretense, Seer. In my youth I was shown many things. ‘Watch and learn,’ they said to me. ‘Bao,’ they said to me. So I watched, but it was only nonsense. They showed me this and showed me that, but it meant nothing. It was only pretense, done to mystify us young ones and keep us subservient. The sign has no power. It is nothing. A symbol only; a symbol of our degradation.”"

"Why are we wondering why the world wishes itself dead when we are doing nothing to heal it?"

"There always has to be someone to see things first."

"“Better late than not at all,” came a voice from the ranked multitude. “Better a tardy lover than a lonely bed.”"

"We had what we thought was the answer and we troubled to look no further."

"We might be able to do something. If we were very lucky, it might even be the right thing."

"I have in recent years often reflected upon memory. One takes it so for granted. One remembers with such facile infallibility. And one finds with such shock – at least it was a shock to me – that memory isn’t true."

"One hates to think that all of existence is trivial."

"It went on, “If you accuse, then you must judge.” “You let your accusers be your judges?” asked Peter, astounded. “Who else should be satisfied?” it asked. “If one’s accusers cannot be satisfied, what is justice?” “One’s accusers might be mad,” Peter suggested, very unwisely I thought, considering where we were. “Mad, and incapable of being satisfied.”"

"Sometimes there is such crowding that there is irritation, and this makes fear or anger; and following fear comes meetings of councils to make regulations; and following regulations is further irritation at the laws that are made."

"There was a great mob of the Oracle’s Brotherhood, dancing in their ribbons, chanting and shouting in a zealot’s parody of purpose, a frantic anarchy that could see no farther than the next bit of inflammatory oratory being shouted on every corner."

"The tallest Father preached. He stood before us in robes of gleaming white, surrounded by the smoke of sweet incense, fondling his groin from time to time as he talked of St. Phallus. St. Phallus loomed behind the altar, erect, massive, as though ready to rape the world. It was not the first such monument I had seen. Wherever men were ignorant and hungry for power, I had seen these things, though never one as large as this. Father fondled his groin and preached. “Holy fruit of St. Phallus,” he said. “Clean seed planted in filthy ground,” he said. “Corrupted by dirty woman-wombs,” he said."

"“I don’t know the sensible plant,” said Cat wonderingly. “Where may it be found?” “It cannot be found,” the Gardener replied. “It is extinct.”"

"It cheered me a little. Enmities among one’s enemies are always comforting."

"They were betrayed, Oracle. Ganver tells me there is no anger greater than that of a zealot betrayed."

"He rejoices to have done with the dead. The living need our attentions more, he says. Who can argue with that?"

"“We are kinsmen, therefore allies. You will forgive me if I do not say ‘kinspersons.’ I learned my English in a more elegant setting, in a more elegant time.”"

"I have often wondered why anger is considered by some Western religions to be a sin. It is such a marvelous protection against evil."

"“To us it does not seem that long ago, possibly because our children hear stories told around the fire of things which happened fifteen centuries back. Such stories carry an immediacy one does not get from books.…” “Which is why some countries carry such old grudges,” offered Marianne. “What children learn at their grandmas’ knees they act upon as though it happened yesterday.” He nodded gravely, even sadly. “Perhaps that is true. Those who have an oral tradition full of old wrongs and old revenge do seem to fight the same battles forever. If the Irish were not forever singing of their ancient wrongs—or writing poetry about it…well, we see the result in every morning’s newspapers.”"

"The difference between a true religion—and there are many which share aspects of truth—and a dangerous cult is only this: In the one the individual is freed to grow and live and learn; in the other the individual is subordinated to the will of a hierarchy, enslaved to the purposes of that hierarchy, forbidden to learn except what the cult would teach. You have only to look at the rules which govern the servants of a religion to know whether its god is God indeed, or devil!"

"“The answers to everything are in the books,” he said to her. “It is in knowing which books, of course, and where to look.”"

"Lion had few doubts about his actions. As he had said on more than one occasion, “I may be wrong, but I am never in doubt.”"

"“I was always willing to help you,” she replied, “as you would have known if you had stopped accusing me and listened.”"

"Disillusionment, pain, unpleasant surprise, all were part of growing up."

"“How did this happen?” she demanded from the world at large. “Software,” the hardware consultant opined. “Hardware,” the software support person snarled."

"What was scheduled had no connection with what actually happened."

"“Each day we investigate all premises within three blocks of the palace. Lookin’ for anarchists and revolutionaries, so they tell us, not that we’ve ever found any. Found a nest of revisionists once, but nobody cared.” “What were they revising?” she asked, truly curious. “Don’t know. Didn’t ask ’em.”"

"What kind of a universe would it be if we could not do small kindnesses for one another?"

"“Sometimes I despair, Ellat. Will I ever be able to surprise you?” “Yes. If you’d listen to me, ever, it would surprise me enormously.”"

"“Of course, the governor says the man is mistaken.” “Governor says he's a stupid ass,” muttered Haurvatat. “I think the man has a glitch in his software somewhere.”"

"Morgot and Myra would tell her there wasn’t any reason to make promises or seek changes because the Great Mother didn’t bargain. The deity didn’t change her mind for women’s convenience. Her way was immutable. As the temple servers said, “No sentimentality, no romance, no false hopes, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!” Which left very little room, Stavia thought, for womanly initiative."

"There is no fucking in Hades."

"We obey orders, and we don’t ask if the officer is crazy or not!"

"Myra subsided into outraged and sulky silence. Her romantic dream of motherhood had been riven into sharp-edged fragments by late-night feedings, constant diaper washing, and a baby who persisted in looking and acting like a baby, not like a young hero."

"Honor is only a label they use for what they want you to do, Chernon. They want you to stay, so they call staying honorable."

"The one sure part of every plan is that it will be set awry."

"The extent of my ignorance oppresses me."

"“We have a saying, we travelers: ‘For a man’s business, go to your troupe leader; for a woman’s business, go to Women’s Country. For a fool’s business, go to the warriors.’”"

"“Show yourselves,” cried Stephon. “Only cowards hide in the dark.” “Cowards do many things,” said the voice. “Cowards kill their Commanders and make it look like a bandit attack. Cowards plot in secret. Cowards breed insurrection. Cowards plan the abuse of women.”"

"To Sylvan truth was truth and all else was black heresy, though on occasion he had the very human difficulty of deciding which was which."

"Rich people didn’t get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity."

"All kids think some other family is perfect."

"They see things; they overhear things; they tell us. We put two and two together to make forty-four, when we must."

"Eugenie thought of this often. Men had told her many sweet things about herself, but never before that she was important. It was the nicest compliment she had ever received."

"All men believed they had their own magics in bed."

"The first thing you’ve got to do is tell yourself that the shitheads are wrong...Not just a little bit wrong, but irremediably, absolutely, and endemically wrong. Nothing you can say or do will stop their being wrong. They’re damned to eternal wrongness, and that’s God’s will."

"“They’ve got a kind of committee there,” he had said, “an office. Acceptable Doctrine, it’s called. Everyone on the committee is mostly concerned about what people believe. They’re running things, too; don’t let them tell you they aren’t. Truth doesn’t enter in. If they’ve decided something is doctrine, they’ll ignore all evidence to the contrary and lie to your face. You don’t want to run afoul of those types, do you? Not if you have questions to ask. No.”"

"If God is truly powerful, He would not let this plague go on."

"“Not hunting today, sir?” asked Tony in his most innocent voice, busy putting two and two together but not sure how he felt about the resultant sum."

"History upon Terra tells us what horrors follow upon religious mandates of unlimited reproduction."

"Don’t waste your time on penitence or guilt. Solving the problem is better!"

"Useless as a third leg on a goose."

"“I don’t have much confidence,” she said. “A lot of what I’ve been taught isn’t making sense.” “That’s the nature of teaching. Something happens, and intelligence first apprehends it, then makes up a rule about it, then tries to pass the rule along. Very small beings invariably operate in that way. However, by the time the information is passed on, new things are happening that the old rule doesn’t fit. Eventually intelligence learns to stop making rules and understand the flow.”"

"Too good is good for nothing."

"I’m trying to decide whether we can afford to be merciful. The Arbai were merciful, but when confronted with evil, mercy becomes an evil."

"They haven’t learned that being penitent sometimes does no good at all."

"Marjorie thought: It always comes down to something like this, doesn’t it. No matter what our consciences say, no matter how much doctrine we’ve been taught, no matter how many ethical considerations we’ve chewed and swallowed and tried to digest, it always comes down to us arming ourselves with weapons as deadly as we can manage and going out into combat..."

"Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief."

"She was trying to feel philosophical about dying, not managing it, trying not to be frightened, and not managing that, either."

"Duty was simply not enough. There had to be more than that!"

"He did a lot of disputation and he always raised his voice when his logic was weak."

"Her tone conveyed the unimportance of anything that might have happened, anywhere, before she came upon the scene."

"Sam grew up to be both dutiful and willful, a boy who would say yes to avoid trouble but then do as he pleased."

"“There’s a lot of fathering in those legends,” Sal commented, disapprovingly. “A lot of fathering, a lot of kinging, a lot of death and violence, and very little uncleing and ordinary kindly living.”"

"But Voorstod had long ago learned what passed for patience among the prophets: a rage they barely bothered to suppress. According to the prophets, if a man failed in his mission, he failed because Almighty God was unhappy with him and willed it so. If God were happy with him, he could not fail. If he failed, God was unhappy with him, and so were the prophets. It was all very logical."

"Let us consider, said Theology Panel: “Is Voorstod a slave state, or is it merely pious?”"

"Should the escaped Gharm be returned as breakers of contract and apostates, as Voorstod demanded? Or should the Gharm be given sanctuary as common sense and good nature dictated? Where did humanity stop and interference with religion begin?"

"Elsewhere negotiation might have worked. With other religions, it could have worked. Voorstod’s God, however, was a jealous and vindictive deity who ruled by murder, terrorism, and malediction. How did one negotiate with that?"

"Where other gods might have advocated making life a garden, Voorstod’s God promised the garden only after death, preferably violent death. Then might the faithful lie about on the greensward sucking grapes and fucking virgins, so the prophets promised."

"As with other peoples who had focused their lives upon wrongs in the past and heaven in the future, Voorstod made an everlasting hell of the present."

"For several days they cut, trimmed, and stacked the slender trunks, trying to pick ones that were straight and uniform in size, being careful not to clear-cut any area of the forest, a deed which Jep’s mom would have regarded as only slightly less dishonorable than genocide."

"It was her way to start each conversation with an apology, so she could be offended when the apology was accepted."

"“Early on, of course, it was assumed that there were lots of gods who caused various things, and one needed access to them to propitiate them or ask them to undo what some other god had done or, in rarer cases, to say thank you. Since there were lots of them, one always had a god to go to if some other one was acting up. Not a bad state of affairs, really, very much the system Phansure has today. Of course, it carried the seeds of its own destruction, because some of the priests that rose up around the man-gods got carried away with their own greed or need for power. “So, some of them became prophets, each of them claiming his particular god—or some new one he’d thought up – what is the biggest or the best or the only. Sometimes they said God was all-good or all-powerful or all-something-or-other or even, God knows, all-everything, which inevitably created dualism, because if God was all-everything, why did these contrary things keep happening? This required that man postulate some other force responsible for contrariness, either a sub-god or a bad angel or man himself, just being sinful, and that placed man squarely in the middle of this cosmic battlefield, always been told it was his fault when things went wrong. “And as long as man was in the middle, nothing could happen but a kind of tug-of-war. Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided that his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized.”"

"“Most of the monotheisms were tribal, pastoral, retributive religions that committed holocausts and built pyramids of skulls and conducted organized murder for a few thousand years, so there were lots of opportunities for one guy’s god to fight some other guy’s god. Each tribal religion claimed that its god was the One True God. Every prophet had his own idea about what that meant, of course, and as a result man was always being jerked around between different people’s ideas of god, depending on who’d won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle. “This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or even hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached persecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygyny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let’s kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren’t any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.”"

"It is our minds and not any other attribute which gives us personhood and value. We share intelligence with other living things, and they are no less important than we. Even creatures without detectable intelligence have adapted themselves to play necessary roles. To make God in our image or we in God’s is blasphemy."

"There is no sin inherent in any mind save the sin of pride in believing one has seen or been taught the absolute truth. The second greatest sin is refusing to search for the truth one must acknowledge one will never absolutely find."

"Even when people are well-meaning, do not let them fool with your heads."

"They still begin their services with the first words the prophetess had spoken to them as a teaching. “This I say unto you, be not sexist pigs.”"

"Other such interpretations were used to order the dress of the High Baidee, which included such items as the zettle, a small scarf of precious material hung from the belt, on one side of which were embroidered the words “Stuff happens,” and on the other “Not guilty.”"

"Though he was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors and demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance."

"Most boys moved when they started having love affairs—or thinking about having love affairs. Just thinking could go on for a considerable time without anything really happening, not like those marriage cultures, where all the women were trying to cling to their virginity and all the males were trying to take it away from them, everybody panting and rushing, trying to grab off acceptable partners under acceptable conditions before they got too old."

"The prophetess had declared it a sin to believe in absolute truths, but the Scrutators claimed that didn’t apply to religious truths, of which they had manufactured a good supply over the centuries."

"“How did you know we were Voorstoders?” he asked in a silken voice. “You said ‘Lord knows,’” the man replied. “Voorstoders say that. I do a bit of reading in the Archives, bit of a hobby with me. Like to read about those old religions. That Lord-this, Lord-that kind of talk belongs to the old tribal religions, doesn’t it?” Old and outworn, said his voice. Old and outworn and suspect."

"“It seems to me,” said Spiggy softly, “that when a race of man becomes so anthropocentric it regards other living beings as lesser consumables, it could get to be a habit. It might become easy to include other living creatures with the Gharm. Animals. Children. Women. Entire planet. Perhaps they, too, become consumables, to be used up and thrown away.”"

"The prophets trusted no one. Trust had no part in the Cause."

"“Coup markers?” Jep had asked Pirva. “The cause?” Pirva had not looked up from what she was doing. “The Cause is their society, their religion, their brotherhood,” she had said, the words dripping like acid from her mouth. “It’s a killers’ club. A man gets a coup counter for each Abolitionist or Gharm man, woman, or child he has killed out there in Ahabar or the Three Counties. There are special counters for bombs set off in the three counties, no matter who is killed or mutilated.”"

"Over time, a very nice system had developed by which persons actually interested in religion as religion (rather than religion as a system of social control, religion as politics, religion as warfare, or religion as spectacle) met over luncheon from time to time to read their scholarly research to one another, while clerks and aides got on with the endless and self-generating paperwork, or so it was still called, despite the fact there was little or no paper involved."

"“No army?” “No. They’ve always advocated terrorist tactics, not battle. Their biggest group is their Faithful, the brethren of the Cause led by that group of fanatics they call the prophets. If you ever want to meet a wild man, meet a prophet. But, in addition to the Cause, there are probably a hundred splinter groups, all of them devoted to terrorism of one kind or another, some of them with only half a dozen members. One nice thing about them, they’ve never been able to work together."

"These men are the kind who would kill their slaves and families rather than let us free them."

"You’ve got to understand they’re a puritan people, Commander. Sex is a very powerful taboo among Voorstoders. They delay it and forestall it when they can. The prophets of the Cause tell them sex is power, and being celibate stores up their power. The priests tell them married sex is all right, but only that. Both priests and prophets tell them not to look at women, not to think of women, that women are evil snares of the devil. And all women past puberty wear robes that cover all of them but their eyes."

"“It would be some young firebrands with more energy than sense, and they would do it because they would regard the religion in question as a kind of disease.” “Catching, is it?” “Seemingly so. Or, perhaps I should say, suspected to be so.” “That could be ugly. People turn fanatic, do they? Rant and rave against the unholy? Claim to have the only source of truth? Execute people for heresy? Burn people at the stake? Shovel them wholesale into ovens?” Rasiel was a student of human history, including its more barbaric periods."

"“Mostly it’s just that you’re not one of us. If you’re not one of us, you’re an unbeliever. Everyone not part of us is part of the devil: you, the people of Ahabar, the people of Phansure, everyone. Our Cause is to destroy the devil, all of it. We’re the only true followers of God. We have the truth. It was revealed to us, long ago, on Manhome.”… “You believe that, too?” “Of course I believe it. It is my Cause. It was my father’s Cause, and his father’s before him. Even on Manhome we killed the unbelievers.”"

"“Great work?” he asked. “The final victory of Almighty God,” said Phaed, with a grin. “In the book it is revealed that we shall put whole worlds to the sword.” Phaed dusted off a chair and sat down. “So say the prophets, and since they say it, so do I.”"

"“Why pretend now that you cared?” “Why not pretend whatever I like if it makes my life easier? We learned that, you see, we Faithful. We learn to say to ourselves whatever we need to say to make the task easy. We learn to say, ‘for God and Voorstod,’ when we blow up some old lady in the toilet or some schoolyard full of children. We wouldn’t necessarily do it for ourselves, you see, but we can do it for God and Voorstod.”"

"“But it’s not true,” blurted Sam, unable to keep quiet. “‘What I say ten times is true.’ That’s one of our Proverbs. We teach the young men to fill their heads with such words. Prayers. Chants. Endless circles of noise. The same sounds repeated over and over until they fill the mind. ‘Resolution is the weapon of God; thought is the enemy of resolution; words keep thought out; therefore, learn words,’ say the Scriptures. Even on Manhome, our sons learned words, by rote, to keep them from the dangers of thinking. What God wants followers who think and doubt? The Almighty wants Faithful, who obey!”"

"I’ve met the prophet Awateh, and he’s very religious, but he’s also completely off his head. It seems to me religious toleration stops when they intend to kill you or hurt you with it. Africa, that’s my aunt, she always said noninterference was a two-way street."

"I think that some people are hardwired a certain way, and they invent religions to go along with the way they are. Like they are hardwired for bigotry or violence or being ignorant—or maybe ignorance is just a kind of bigotry. People say they don’t want to know a complicated truth, you know, because they already believe something simple, some thing that’s easier on their minds."

"That’s why they become prophets. Why would you want to be one, otherwise? Why would you want to scream your head off and threaten people with death and torture and Hell and make women cover themselves up unless you were hardwired for being crazy? The point is, if somebody’s hardwired and you’re not, the only thing he’ll let you be is a follower. If an ordinary person tries to talk to a hardwired person and be nice to him, it doesn’t do any good. It’s like being nice to a fruit-plucking machine. It’ll pluck out your eyes if you get in the way, no matter how fast you talk or how nice you are. Punishment doesn’t work, and talking to them won’t work, and arguing with them won’t work, any more than arguing with a plucking machine would work."

"We have a saying, we Gharm. A man who claims to carry the truth, carries an empty sack."

"“I think he is a wicked man.” Sam said doggedly, “Are you so sure he is wicked, Lilla? Perhaps, away from here, he might change.” “We Gharm have a saying. Perhaps, away from the pond, the frog would grow feathers.”"

"“Also, the people who’ve left tended to be those who thought man was more important than other parts of creation, and themselves more important than other men,” Africa mused. “Me-and-my-image devotees. Human fertility worshippers. The kind of people who will happily kill other species to make room for more humans, advocates of the old ‘fill up the world and ruin it’ philosophy.”"

"Our lives are made up of many things, not just one. Many answers, not just one. It’s men that want one answer for everything. They’re always making laws, as though they could make one law that would be just in all cases. They can’t. They never have. I think men get derailed, sometime during their growing up. Instead of settling for what’s honest and real and sort of thoughtful, they go off on these quests. They go strutting and crowing, waving their weapons and shouting their battle cries. They say they’re seeking something higher, but it always seems to end in pain, doesn’t it?"

"Like, on Thyker, those High Baidee make a law that says no killing, ignoring the times when killing is the only merciful thing to do, but then they make exceptions for war, because they like war. I know all about it. We women know all about it."

"Phaed: wife-murderer, woman-killer, culprit of the Cause, one of the Faithful, faithful indeed, to the most ancient and bloody of all religions. Me-worship. My sex-worship. My tribe-worship. My kind-worship. Vowing rage and destruction against all else."

"Ire and Iron and Voorstod, the three peoples who had followed Voorstod the prophet away from Manhome. Voorstod with its pastors, Ire with its priests, and Iron with its prophets: the first to rule the slaves, the second to rule the women, the last to rule the men—to rule the men, or to be used by the men, to rule. That had always been the way of men’s Gods, old men’s Gods. To use the Gods to rule."

"Old men’s religions and old men’s legends, always elsewhere, in the dark, so they could not be seen too clearly. So they could not be examined too closely. So they could go on, breeding, fulminating, burning, and rotting in the dark."

"A man may not face both ways at once. If he looks back, he cannot look forward."

"She knew that ancient evils could be left behind. One could choose not to remember. One did not have to dig into the slime pits of old anger and old hate. Forgetting was possible."

"Men, she thought, had always been able to seek holiness when they wanted to because some woman was back at home taking care of their obligations. That’s why most of the saints were men and why most of the women saints were virgins."

"Their act was fine as it was, but as Sizzy said, mere titillation was limited by both prurience and credulity, while entertainment had no boundaries. “If you entertain people well enough, they don’t care you’re a fake,” said Aunt Sizzy. “Most people don’t give a damn about the truth, anyhow.” She mentioned some politicians, including a recent president, as examples. “The world’s biggest phonies, not very bright, but they entertained people, so nobody cared.”"

"It takes a strong man to turn back from a bad choice."

"Derbeck is a theocracy based on religious and political orthodoxy. Arbitrary executions and torture are integral to such systems."

"Evil comes from unchecked power."

"They parade their cruelty openly, calling it diplomacy, calling it expediency, as governments always have."

"“Such plagues are known to arise spontaneously on overcrowded planets,” Jory commented. “When any environment exceeds its carrying capacity, plagues begin to manifest themselves, though humans are always surprised when it happens.”"

"Oh, I know what you Enforcers think about the council, Ertigon. We’d have to be complete fools not to know. You take us for pompous idiots, mostly, layabouts who spend our days eating and drinking and engaging in our effete little rituals, none of which mean anything, accomplish anything. You’re perfectly right, that’s what we are. But then, that’s what we were assigned to do. That’s what we’re here for. It’s what all public servants have always been: roadblocks, resistors, interceptors of change, valves designed to shut down the flow of events, inhibitors of revolution, delayers of evolution, servants of the status quo."

"“I don’t need you to believe. I can make you do what I say even if you don’t believe.” A sulky-sounding voice, this. “God doesn’t need to prove anything, not if god can make people do what god wants.”"

"It is better to die than to be used by evil for evil’s purposes."

"Whoever…whatever had done this was an evil person, an evil thing, and she, Fringe, would have to do whatever she could to set matters right, diversity be damned!"

"I meant the petitions to provoke thought, to create discussion, but I underestimated the inertia in the system. I forgot that inertia is what bureaucracies are all about!"

"“It’s exactly the way we thought and acted. Men didn’t have to be better! At least, not in terms of western thought, he didn’t. He strutted and crowed and told himself just as he was, he was made in the image of God! It was easier to depend on heaven than be responsible on earth, but humans were divinely created so why worry.” “And you don’t believe he was? Human?” “He wasn’t what I thought of as sapiens. In my opinion, very few of us were sapiens. Maybe none of us were. Maybe we’d had a chance of becoming sapiens, but we threw it away.” “When did mankind do that?” “In Nela’s time, I think. It was then that pitiful people who saw no reality and knew no science declared the holiness of reproduction. And while the liberals were preserving the right to beget, the reactionaries were preserving the faults in our gene pool. We could corrupt and destroy all the rest of creation, but our own germ plasm was sacred. It didn’t matter that there were billions of us, but anything sapiens about us was far more threatened by our numbers than by any change we might make in ourselves.…”"

"Here priests and prophets are doing what priests and prophets have always done, forbidding their people to become anything except what they already are! No interference. God, what foolishness!"

"Jory continued in a lecturer’s tone. “Old women like us, Cafferty, are left here to die. It would not be fitting for them to die where men who don’t own them might look upon them—and of course their owners don’t want to look at them—so they die here, where none see them. The religion of Thrasis prohibits murder. They are merely given no food or water and left to the mercy of the Thrasian God.”"

"“If we can.” “No matter if you can or not. You must.” Anger bested her. “That’s not logical. That’s completely arbitrary. To demand that someone do something he may not be able to do.” “We have consulted Files.” The voice bubbled with hideous laughter. “Gods often demand that people do things they cannot do or things that are dangerous or onerous or hateful. And when the people fail, gods punish them. Should I be less a god than they?”"

"“The show,” Aunt Sizzy was want to say, “may not have to go on, but we don’t buy groceries unless it does!”"

"Think of how much time and effort it would have saved if we’d only known what man’s destiny actually was. Think of our time, all the fundamentalist fascists versus the civil libertines; all the liberals throwing our money at the poor versus the conservatives throwing our money at themselves; all the male versus female controversies, all the revolutions, sexual, political, and economic. How marvelous if we’d only known what was important and what wasn’t!"

"“As good Catholic children, our destiny was to be guilty over sex, to have lots of babies, and to partake of the sacraments sufficiently often to assure that we’d go to heaven when we died.” “Right,” said Bertran. “And in the fundamentalist church down the block, they learned their destiny was to be guilty over sex, to worship the flag (in defiance of the first and second commandments), and to be born again sufficiently often to assure they’d go to heaven when they died, though I’m not sure whether it was the same heaven or not. In fact, the only real difference between us and them was whether we ranked sperm or the flag slightly ahead of god.”"

"“Oh, yes,” murmured Nela. “The only excuse we had for overpopulating our world was that it wouldn’t matter in heaven.” She tried to laugh but couldn’t manage it. The laugh turned into a sob."

"“We Enforcers have a saying: ‘the right help helps, and enough help helps, but help that’s in time helps most.’”"

"Orimar Breaze also considered his godhood. His followers would be called Breazians. He would demand behaviors and customs peculiar to himself. He would make rules, complicated rules, and many of them, that would take a lot of time and trouble and pain to keep. The only way he could know that his people truly loved him would be if they obeyed many onerous rules. There should be many rituals, also, rituals for everything. Much crawling. He liked the idea of crawling. Slithering, even. Also, abstentions from…from anything pleasurable. He tried to remember what things were pleasurable. What were they? It had been such a long…so many…so… Was it sex? He seemed to remember it was sex. And food. Food had been pleasurable. So, he would make many rules about sex, many rules about food. If the rules were difficult enough, they would because for much backsliding, and that, and its turn, would be cause for much reproval! He would force…He would make people…He would punish them until they… Though he could not remember the taste of food or wine, the feel of love, the joys of human movement, he felt a surge of pure pleasure at the idea of power. He would conduct himself properly as a god, using sweet and seductive words at first; then, if that failed, using power and pain to teach his people to adore him."

"Afar, Legless God Orimar Breaze howled rage and resentment of this nonsense. There were only two classes of beings: adorers or persecutors."

"“I was a free person.” “Free to what?” “To…to do anything I wanted to.” Jory laughed, shaking her head. “Weren’t you told as a child that one way was better than another, one belief better than another? Weren’t you told some things were higher and some lower? That some things were suitable for women, others for men? That your God was more powerful? That your religion was truer? That your language was more expressive? That your customs had more heart, or more soul? That your cooking tasted better? That your way of child-rearing was preferable? That all your ways were so much better than others ways that you would die to keep yours as they were, or die to destroy others if they seemed threatening? Weren’t you taught not to change, not to adapt, not to become anything different? Weren’t you taught the word ‘loyalty’? The word ‘tradition’? Didn’t they tell you that animals were higher than vegetables, mammals were higher than other animals, man was higher than other mammals, and your kind of man was higher than other men? “You think you weren’t enslaved by that? You think you had freedom of choice? I have said this to Fringe, I say it to you: A man’s choice becomes his son’s duty and his grandson’s tradition! Thus men assure enslavement of their progeny.”"

"Breaze had decided that he would require his followers to believe illogical things as evidence of their faith. He would require them to believe that Breaze had created Elsewhere and all its people in one day, out of nothing, exactly one thousand years ago! But… (a master stroke) he would leave evidence in Files to contradict this! Thus they would have to disbelieve the evidence of their own senses in order to believe in Breaze! When he got to this point, a small voice asked why he had given men such senses in the first place? Why had he given them intelligence if he intended to forbid its use?"

"Things are as they are, and no amount of wishful thinking will change them!"

"Man has always tortured in the name of his gods and committed atrocities in the name of his culture."

"“Love cannot be owed,” said the retreating shadow. “It can only be given.”"

"The Ultimate Destiny of Man is to stop being only man."

"“If you are less uncontrolled, you won’t find yourself rolling around on the floor making infant noises and attracting the scorn and derision of your fellows.” “Damn motherfuckers ain my fellows.” “What did you say?” “I said I feel little collegiality for those sharing my conditions of servitude.”"

"“Go to the simul and slap people around, kill people, that’s what you want. Do it! But you can’t do it out here!” It sounded great, but nobody stayed dead in a simul! How could you get any satisfaction killing somebody who didn’t stay dead?"

"“Tell them they may go. I don’t approve of anything they’re doing.” Angered, the minister growled: “The Firster godmongers pray for you daily in your blindness, Majesty. Man is meant to procreate! We were given the universe to fill. What are a few animals, a few trees in the face of our destiny?”"

"Blind faith in somebody stepping in to fix things eliminates a lot of emotional stress, so blind faith is what most people have!"

"“The first rule of governance is never to choose who to sacrifice,” snarled the Procurator. “Or, at least, never to be seen to choose. Death and dismemberment must always be…inadvertent. Everybody’s fault or nobody’s fault!”"

"Fearful people develop their religions as protective devices, ways to manipulate hostile environments, formulas for identifying and defeating their enemies. The more fearful people are, the more enemies they have, the more adversarial language they use."

"Also, the god often resembles his followers in behavior and feelings. Angry people have angry gods and vindictive people have vindictive gods, and so forth."

"Does the worm on the hook expect to be rescued simply because the fish have eaten all the other worms?"

"Sex was pleasurable, sure, but survival was sweeter still."

"“An itchy man is prey to discontent; he’ll suage his flea bites with the blood of kings.” Surely the common man wouldn’t want that!” “What common men want most is beer and sex, without disturbances.”"

"“Even pain,” said the king, with no intention of being prophetic, “even pain is preferable to dying of unrelieved ennui.”"

"What he’d said wasn’t inaccurate; it was simply a ridiculous understatement."

"“He has brain waves!” she shouted. “He has the same kind of brain waves as chickens. As a matter of fact, his brain waves are virtually indistinguishable from those of chickens.” “He’s not a chicken. He’s a human being!” Leelson’s face was very pale, his mouth was hard. “Morphologically, he’s a human being. Mentally, he’s a chicken.”"

"Godmongers have always found it easy to pay for their beliefs with women’s lives.…"

"Despite Lutha’s undoubted intelligence, she was constantly exploding like fireworks, laughing or crying, passionate about every trifle. On Dinadh, we think of such behavior as typical of children, not serious adults."

"As the Gauphin taught, people are ridiculous! We have language and history, we have technology and philosophy, and we still have not achieved good sense and self-control!"

"Don’t take me for a fool, lovely girl. We fat old things have not laid aside our brains with our silhouettes."

"Those who encounter chains of events at two disparate points, without observing the connections, think they have observed coincidence when they have, in fact, seen only consequence."

"Every hundred years they would be disillusioned, and each time they would swear to hide their disillusionment in order to retain their power. “We won’t tell anyone,” they’d say. “We won’t let anyone know. We’ll deny it. We’ll defend the traditional teachings!” Such things that happened before! Men in power had made mistakes or foolish claims and spent the rest of their lives and their successors’ lives defending the indefensible, or hiding it."

"“That’s different. That’s paradise. Like it was on Breadh.” “Were there many people on Breadh?” Snark laughed, abruptly joyous. “Hardly any! That’s what made it paradise!”"

"Pain and loss. Hope dimmed. Ambition quenched. Love becoming an unfunny joke on the lovers! Body saying aye; mind saying nay; now saying can; future saying can’t."

"The stories of Old-earth are shared among the people of Old-earth. Even I, Saluez, can identify elephant and whale, ostrich and eagle, serpent and wolf, though they exist no longer. I know that they were and now are not, because of mankind."

"“Most gods of most worlds have human faces.” “Because men make them in their image,” Lutha remarked, somewhat bitterly. “To grant mankind license to do what we would do anyway.”"

"“Will you go home again?” Would I go home again? To the lies the songfathers told? To the pain of the House Without a Name? To that terrible destiny for my daughters? To connivance at that evil by my sons? To sell truth and wisdom short in order to buy the false hope of immortality? Somehow I got to my feet. “No,” I cried. My voice was the cry of a small bird against that mighty thunder. Still I cried, “No. I will not!”"

"Some can see no farther than their mirrors. What wears another face must go unseen."

"Do not wish to live forever. Do not believe that every man-shaped thing is holier than something else. Do not look into the mirror to see the face of God."

"On that far horizon the Sandia Mountains stand behind their outliers in receding gradations of gray or blue or violet, paper cutouts against the lighter sky, vanishing into night when the lights of the city come on. Then the stars look down and the air is sweet with piñon smoke as centuries-old nut-bearing trees are burned for the momentary pleasure of those who, unlike the native peoples, never think of the food the trees produce."

"Another window to the outside opened on the first day of school, when an eager young teacher told the class they could find out anything in the world if they paid attention and learned to read. To Jake it came as a revelation, the missing piece of the puzzle of his life! Here was the secret of existence he had known must be somewhere! All the mysteries of his existence would come clear, all the things he wondered about, if he would only learn to read. He did learn, quickly, passionately, with the ardor many boys reserve for sports."

"Keepe pursed his lips, nodded. “We’re already in a very strong position in this country, of course. We’ve taken over all of the antigovernment militias, most of the religious groups who think of themselves as conservative, plus what’s left of the KKK and the American Nazi party, but they’re only pocket change. We now own the Republican party. Any moderates still hiding in there have been flushed out. We’ve been managing the press for over twenty years now, and the public is accustomed to our view of the world.” Jagger paid attention. “I didn’t realize...” “Oh, yes. People don’t want to absorb new information. They like predictability. So as long as we don’t surprise the public with the truth, we’re free to move as we like. Very shortly we won’t even have to be covert about it. And then, of course, people are sick of issues. Civil rights, human rights, women’s rights—people are tired of all that. You understand?”"

"One of the difficulties of being the good guys is that even open societies have to have secret police, and secret police turn toward repression as a compass points north."

"She needed more sleep and less aggravation."

"Fear needn’t be grounded in fact to cause problems."

"“Words? Not really. Mankind is a good word.” She set down her glass with a thump. “Or humankind. I’m afraid we’ve spent a lot of feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions.”"

"Infanticide and infant neglect exist in inverse ratio to the accessibility of abortion services."

"Here we are after a couple million years of natural selection has produced a race that overpopulates and makes war and dominates and rapes, and you want to know about wisdom! Natural selection doesn’t select for wisdom!"

"What’s coming is reality. Politics has nothing to do with reality!"

"“When your people began to press upon us, long, long ago, we moved into remote enclaves. To us, numbers are not strength; wisdom is strength. What profiteth a race to be numerous and stupid, la? Behold how great we are, saith the lemming!” She laughed."

"We believe that nothing worthy of our worship would want our worship."

"The boys attend the Institute. I saw where they keep the girls. They are not taught anything. They are merely fed, bathed, given exercise, raised so until puberty, at which time they are culled. The enemy does not want either rebellion or thought bred into his followers, so any who show signs of independence or unusual intelligence are culled."

"They looked like men. That was the trouble with devils, Carolyn thought. Too often they looked like men."

"No sooner had the coronation occurred than Haraldson issued the Edicts of Equity, in which for the first time humanity was defined in terms of intelligence, civility, and the pursuit of justice rather than by species or form. Certain Earthian creatures other than mankind were immediately rendered human by the edicts, gaining the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions thereby, and some extremist individuals and groups who had previously paraded themselves as human were disabused of this notion."

"Theoretical liberties, however, we are too often assured at the expense of actual civilities, and as civilities were lost, litigation emerged as a way of life with a consequent reduction in real liberties for all persons except lawyers, who, like mercenaries, are profiteers of discord. Persons were actually allowed, by law, under the guise of free expression, to shout into the faces of those who held differing opinions and to intrude upon their privacy. Liberty has two legs. Vigilance is certainly one, but civility is as certainly the other."

"Some people, more often men, spend their entire lives awash in bitterness. They rage against injustices done to their forefathers, perhaps centuries in the past. They rage against injustices done to their countrymen, their families. They rage against people who are unlike themselves, who, by virtue of their difference, must be up to no good. They rage against people who are like themselves who do not share their views. They rage against their parents, their wives, their children, and against anyone who is sympathetic to any of these. Their rage is a screen between them and the world, behind which they huddle over their egos, like a caveman over his fire, unable to see out through the smoke."

"We all know men who are angry at everything, simply because they prefer to be angry at everything. Often, they self-destruct, and sometimes they take other people with them."

"If you have read your assignment, you know that mankind has a stratified mentality. The ancient lizard mind lies below the mammalian mind, which lies below a primate mind, which is modified by a mind adapted to language, and since these layers have developed in response to differing evolutionary pressures, they often do not function efficiently together. Human civility tries to control ape dominance, human rationality tries to control mammalian sexuality, human social conscience tries to ameliorate reptilian greed, never with total success."

"“The groups are stratified, with one or more leaders and the rest as followers. This pattern continues even today, though the acquisition of language allows such groups to be institutionalized as tribes, armies, political parties, commercial empires, religious hierarchies, or sports teams. All of these have rules requiring defense and extension of territory by carrying some play object—a ball, flag, icon, trademark, or belief system—into someone else’s territory. From the psychological point of view, there is very little difference between making religious converts, kicking the winning goal, or cornering the market on Thorbian gigarums. “Proper gang activity requires the control of members. Gangs cannot tolerate ‘loose’ persons wandering around. One is either with the church or against it; with the company or against it; with the team or against it.”"

"“Persons inside the group are ‘us.’ All significant entities outside the group, including females, are ‘them,’ and all of them are either property, prey, or opponents.”"

"“Females who agree to be property are the survivors. Belonging to a mature, powerful male guarantees his protection for her and her children and raises the female’s rank in the primate society. The higher the rank, the less she is harassed and the more she gets to eat. Over millions of years, therefore, it has become instinctive for females to mate with the most dangerous, most dominant male they can attract.”"

"Mankind had always had a propensity for trying to govern the ungovernable and to control what was uncontrollable. Mankind had always relied upon laws and rules to direct those drives that did not care about laws or rules. Pragmatism had at last prevailed."

"The view panel was there, of course. It didn’t have to depict trees and moonlight. She could ask for virtually anything ever written to be printed or dramatized, and she’d tried that a few times, but the panel remained obdurately there, between her and whatever story it was trying to convey. A book would be better. With books, she wasn’t conscious of anything except living the narrative. Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being someone else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement."

"Seed on wind and being adaptable. Same as me, Ellin. Same as everybody. All of us, seeds. Seed is ninety percent precursor mammal, like mouse. Seven or eight percent chimpanzee-human primate precursor. One point nine nine nine percent generalized Homo sapiens. Tiny fraction one percent me, or you, different from everybody else. One healthy creature being able to blow on wind and still live! Able to choose."

"Questioner I was melted down in the cataclysm known as the Flagian Miscalculation, somewhere out near the Bonfires of Hell. The Flagians’ attempt to prove that matter was illusory succeeded only in redistributing that matter rather widely."

"Any mankind person worth his salt can simultaneously incubate whole clutches of ideas that are either contradictory or mutually exclusive. For instance, mankind has persuaded itself that its race is perfectible, though it hasn’t changed physically, mentally, or psychologically since the Cro-Magnon. Mankind has also persuaded itself that each individual is unique, though each person shares ninety-nine and ninety-nine one hundredths of his DNA and roughly the same percentage of his ideas with thousands or even millions of other persons."

"“Our religion is based upon eschewing human sacrifice in favor of lives that are fulfilling, productive, and joyful.” Startled, Ellin cried, “Human sacrifice! I am surprised you can think of such a thing!” D’Jevier said with unfeigned weariness, “My dear young woman, our history is made up of millennia of human sacrifice. Well into the twenty-first century, huge armies of young men were sacrificed to tribal or national honor, women were sacrificed to male supremacy, children were sacrificed to brutality, all immolated in flames of painful duty. We try to determine whether the dutiful will suffer and to decide how that suffering may be compensated. We continually redesign our society to provide joy to those who incur pain on our behalf.”"

"“All societies maintain themselves by forcing personal behavior into a mold or pattern which the society calls its ‘culture.’ The patterns are imposed by natural or political conditions; for example, either recurrent drought or recurrent persecution can result in similar patterns. Most patterns require changes in behavior, and that requires changes in belief systems, or vice versa, sort of chicken and egg as to which comes first. “So a few thousand years go by and the climate changes, or the politics, but the people still follow the same taboos because by now they believe their deity ordered them to do it. Long-practiced behaviors that started as a response to conditions, always fossilize into ‘traditional values,’ that is, the only ‘right way’ to do things. At that point people no longer use the system in order to survive, the system uses them in order to survive. That’s something people often don’t understand. Systems are parasitical, they have a life of their own, and they, too, evolve and change and try to survive. The one factor that is true of all cultures, without exception, is that it never represents the free desires of the people who are jammed into it even when people are conditioned from childhood to accept uniformation.” “Really?” asked Ellin. “Never?” Questioner grinned at her. “Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don’t often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of.”"

"“But you’re saying all societies are coercive,” said Ellin in a troubled voice. Questioner laughed. “But Honorable Ellin, of course they are. This is what makes reading history so amusing. Most cultures think of themselves as free while regarding others as coerced. They do so because they are following traditional values, and the generations of coercion that resulted in those values is long forgotten.”"

"“Prey, property, or opponent,” gasped Mouche, who was now in the door they had entered through, breathing the cleaner air of the sneakway. “Madame said that’s how gangs think.” Questioner nodded. “One like this was a gang unto herself. So long as we think of such people as humans and attempt to treat them as humans, we cannot protect the innocent.”"

"“I dreamed this,” he said in a helpless voice. “I dreamed this!” “Well, Mouche,” said Questioner in a chilly, admonitory voice, “I am sure you believe so. It is all very mystic and dreamlike, and though I can be sensitivity to the moods and impressions such places evoke, I try not to give way to them. When dream is most attractive, then is time to be alert and practical, for it is then that we are most in danger.”"

"“Pff,” said the Timmy. “You mankinds with your fathers and mothers. This is one of the first things we thought strange, you all the time talking my father this, my mother that. What does fathers and mothers have to do with who you are? Your planet is your mother; time is your father. Your insides know this! All life outside you is your kinfolk. Even we dosha are your kin, born of another planet but with the same father as you. Starflame makes your materials, and live-planet assembles them, and time designs what you are, not your fathers and mothers. Pff. You could be genetic assemblage; Bofusdiaga could make you without fathers or mothers; and you would still be persons! But you could not have material without stars, or life without planet, or intelligence without time and be any way at all. It is your stars and your world and long time gives you legs to dance and brains to plan and voices to sing.”"

"There is a class of person who cannot lead and will not be led. Such persons go their own way, uncorrupted by insight, unmitigated by experience. They do what they do, and usually they die of it, but they would rather die than cooperate with anyone else."

"Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from. If there has never been conflict, imagination never develops. Wits arise in answer to danger, to pain, to tragedy. No one ever got smarter eating easy apples."

"“They won’t be sensible. All they will do is talk about how they have been wronged. Those jongau, they were also wronged. Bofusdiaga says creatures who think only of how they are wronged cannot help with the dance and everything is lost.” Questioner rubbed her head. “If you had asked me, Corojum, I could have told you that those people in the cave would be of no help. They are young, rebellious, and not at all useful. At that age, many young people spend a great deal of time thinking they have been wronged.”"

"Bofusdiaga says past wrongs cannot be righted because past wrongs are past and time only runs one way. Bofusdiaga says all you independent creatures suffer great wrongs sometime in past, which is normal, but you stay always living in past so you can continue wronged forever! Forever miserable, forever tragical! Bofusdiaga says so long as you go chewing yesterday’s pains, you cannot eat today’s pleasures, so it is no help!"

"“This is not philosophy, this is reality. Will you please keep in mind what’s going on!”"

"“Handling surplus population is a perpetual challenge,” said Onsofruct. “Has it not been written that the poor are always with us?” Questioner shook her head. “Handling surplus men isn’t that difficult. Just start a lively war or find some new frontier—there’s always dangerous work that needs doing. If that fails, one can create lethal rites of passage to kill off batches at a time. One needn’t pretend, not with men. The gang chief or general simply talks them into a fury and sends them into battle, and then gives them a medal after they’re maimed or dead. Or, the employer gets them to use up their lives in a factory and then tosses them aside with a memento and an inadequate pension. Team spirit does the rest.”"

"“Punishment is not my business,” said Questioner. “As I have said to others, it never works anyhow. Putting right is my business. Unfortunately, when things are put right, often the innocent suffer with the guilty.”"

"Even our earliest espousers of human rights limit them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions. They do not guarantee posterity or immortality."

"We are made of the stuff of stars, given our lives by a living world, given our selves by time. We are brother to the trees and sister to the sun. We are of such glorious stuff we need not carry pain around like a label. Our duty, as living things, to be sure that pain is not our whole story, for we can choose to be otherwise. As Ellin says, we can choose to dance."

"“You think staying in power is why they do it?” “That’s usually the reason for arbitrary cruelty.”"

"Madame says when we focus on our anger, our vision begins to constrict. Soon we are caught up in fury, and we turn it upon everyone."

"The poor are like foxes: they need intelligence in order to survive. The rich, however, have power; they don’t need good sense."

"“You don’t like him?” asked Aufors, wondering whether the man had gone mad on the job or been hired because he was mad enough for the job. There were jobs where madness was an asset. The military was full of them."

"It’s hard to talk like a human being when one hasn’t been treated like one for years!"

"“Thirst makes any wine drinkable…” “…And greed makes any crime thinkable.”"

"Despite his concern, he was not so out of control as to forget that a frantic man is a careless man, a lesson every soldier learns soon or dies wishing he had learned sooner."

"Perhaps my cynicism comes in good time. Better I have it early than too late."

"An intelligent woman herself, the Duchess had overestimated the Marshal’s intelligence. Not an ambitious woman, she had underestimated his ambition. So are many misread by other’s lights."

"He blunders about like an ape in an apiary, infuriating the inhabitants and missing all the sweetness!"

"“So the Glass Master story is real?” “Oh, yes, my dear. The story is real. When you must lie, my dear, lie as little as possible. That way you’ll have the least to remember.”"

"“I’ve met people like him.” Garth nodded sagely. “Men of customary inaction who can be spurred to sporadic excess. Such men often start ill-planned projects that they lack either energy to complete or the wit to abandon.”"

"“But how is it you know all this about how large the ocean is? I thought you girls were limited to pretty chatter and the economics of housekeeping. I didn’t know you learned geography.” “We don’t,” she said, somewhat shamefaced. “But we learned to read, and once one can read, one can learn anything.”"

"“By now, the Mahahmbi think we’ve always been around. They already believed they were God’s favorites when they came here, so it wasn’t hard to persuade them God created slaves for them.” Melanie snarled, “And if you believe you’re God’s favorite, killing a few women and children doesn’t bother you…”"

"“And all this time that I’ve worried over the state of my soul, I shouldn’t have bothered,” Genevieve said angrily."

"I know you want me to believe all this, but it seems little different from the religious stories we learned in school, esoteric and relatively pointless."

"You felt something huge and marvelous of which you are part, and in the moments you described, you forgot yourself for you were one with your world and with the sky above it, and even the stars looking down. There is nothing larger or more wonderful than that. Still, there are those who would prefer self. They will accept any belief, no matter how foolish, if it guarantees them personal immortality. I know people like that. But there are others who know themselves well enough to realize how limiting that is."

"No one ever has to believe! The universe is, it does not require belief. Do you think it will stop existing if you do not believe? Do you think far galaxies will harbor resentment against you if you do not believe? Do you resent the ant who does not look up and admire you? Never!"

"You reacted to stop the Mahahmbi killing your women, but you did nothing about their killing other women. It’s clear you could have done something. You are numerous enough that you could have killed the Mahahmbi who came out into the desert to perform those rituals!"

"Thinking it over later, she blamed TV and the movies for her immediate reaction. The media gobbled everything that happened or could happen, then spit it out, over and over, every idea regurgitated, every concept so mushed up that when anything remarkable actually occurred it was already a cliché. Like cloning or surrogate mothers or extraterrestrials and UFOs. The whole world had heard about it and seen movies about it, and had become bored with the subject before it even happened!"

"One of the strangest things I have encountered on your world, dear Benita, is that many of your people have no idea who they really are but many ridiculous ideas about what they are expected to be, plus many religious convictions about what they should be, although nobody is! One should not want to be anything but what one is because it creates unhappiness."

"Whatever he thinks, it’s time you stopped enabling other people so you can enable yourself."

"People don’t seem to rob bookstores much, more’s the pity for them."

"If a person torturing and killing people is evil, why are gods who torture and kill people called good?"

"Some professor of history wrote that cultures define their gods when they’re young and primitive, when their main concern is survival. They endow their gods with survival characteristics like omnipotence and authoritarianism, belligerence and suspicion, and that’s what goes into all their myths or scriptures. Then, if they survive long enough, they begin to develop morality. They examine their own history, and they learn that authoritarianism doesn’t accord with free will, that belligerence and suspicion are unhealthful, but this newly moral culture is stuck with its bigoted, interfering gods, plus it’s stuck with people who prefer the old bloody gods and use them as their justification for doing all kinds of awful things."

"She concluded: “Legalization would drive prices down, crime would stop, then we could take care of the addicts...” “And you do not do this because of...politics?” The Secretary of State said, “The war against drugs is big business. Thousands of people are on the payroll. The people on the payroll don’t want the problem solved, though they can’t say that out loud or, perhaps, even admit it to themselves. Instead, they continue to take a moral position that requires them to punish people. Punishing people is always considered moral.”"

"Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible!"

"“Why do reporters have to dig into people’s privacy?” she fumed. “Communication is much like sex.” This set her back. “I don’t understand...” A chuckle. “Being celibate is often wise and prudent. People know this, but the inborn drive to reproduce makes their organs wag. Keeping silent is often wise and prudent. People know this, also, but the drive to question and tell makes their tongues wag. Sex spreads genetic material, good and bad; prying spreads information, true and false; natural selection takes over and both ethical failings contribute to continuing evolution.”"

"When agony is not present, no matter how imminent it looms, painful change must come from outside. This is a truth."

"We have a saying, “Where one lives, all live; where one suffers, all suffer.” One, in our language, includes all living things. In your language someone has said, “No man is an island,” which encompasses the concept but which, by mentioning only mankind, misses the point."

"Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?"

"The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust."

"If the children die, well, say they, it is the will of their gods. I do not like such ways; certainly I would not follow such gods."

"We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace."

"“Thirty thousand some odd kids starve every day.” ”That’s not something we accept!” “Oh, hell, Senator. Don’t feed me the party line. When was the last time any of your colleagues voted for overseas family planning programs? You guys claim it’s to prevent abortion, but you know it’s not. You know damn well cutting family planning causes more abortions than it prevents, but you still do it. Why? Because most of the pro-life people are anti-contraception, too. And anti-sex education. And anti-gay. And anti-women’s-rights. But they’re pro-gun, pro-hunting, pro-military. Killing’s part of their lives."

"As previously announced, we are already studying how to remedy the problems with your schools. The causes of their failures are many, ramified, and deeply entrenched in local politics. The most amazing thing about the situation is that fifty years ago, a century ago, your schools were far better than they are now! They taught fewer subjects and taught the better, with far more success and far less jargon. Everyone agreed then that children were children, that is, impulsive, naive, and ignorant creatures in need of training. No one suggested then that schools or teachers had to put up with hostility or violence or that students had “rights” to such behavior or that freedom of speech included rudeness in the classroom. Persons could be expelled from school and sometimes were. Children were expected to be good citizens and mannerly, and the schools taught citizenship and manners. A necessary adjunct to the school was the truant officer, who sought out and detained any child under eighteen who was not in school, and children did not get out of school until they could read and write and do arithmetic. As is true on so many worlds, the theoreticians and politicians have ruined a good thing."

"“I think I mentioned to you that there’ve been some rumors about where certain soft contributions to senatorial campaigns come from. Dink works for Morse. Morse gets lots of soft money. This has got to be where it’s coming from.” “What does Morse do in return?” “He votes for the war on drugs. Votes more money for the DEA. Makes sure there’s no drug policy reform. The War on Drugs keeps the market up, keeps the dealers working, keeps the money flowing. They don’t want drugs legalized. It’d be like what happened when we stopped Prohibition. The gangsters didn’t want it stopped. They made millions.”"

"He thinks he’s a liberal, he’s generally on our side, but he’s also ex-military, and he falls for the national security gambit every time someone plays it. Star Wars. Stealth anything. Talk about burning the flag and he gets all choked up. Funny, so many of these guys think the country stands for the flag instead of the other way around. So long as Old Glory’s whipping in the breeze, it’s okay to deal guns to kids and cheat on your taxes."

"It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts."

"The world had been repeatedly swept by war and famine and plague when the population had been a quarter of what it was now! Less than a hundred years ago. Sparse population didn’t equal peace. It never had. All it meant were fewer casualties."

"We would prefer to believe them, and we’ve gone along with them when they’ve told us the predators are a separate people, races that eat other intelligent life and who do not, therefore, eat Republicans. Or newsmen."

"That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates. Statesmen should not “play” politics."

"As our sages have said, youth builds a universe with self at the center."

"The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment."

"When I was a kid, Mami told me the Mexican gods weren’t the only bloody ones, and we should never serve gods that had been invented to take the blame for everything bloody, painful, primitive and unenlightened that people wanted to do. Why did we Israelites kill every man, woman, child and beast in that city? Why, the Lord Jehovah commanded it. Why do we Spaniards steal food from these Indian people, and mutilated them, and use them as slaves? Why, we do it so they will love Christ! Why do we Aztecs torture and sacrifice people? Huitzilopotchli demands it! Whether it was the Israelites invading Canaan or the Spanish invading the Southwest, or one Mexican tribe warring against another, the answer was always the same. We enslave and torture and mutilate and kill in the name of our god."

"My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there’s only one book or tradition or whatever it’s called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter for somebody’s third wife."

"“It does not seem impossible,” murmured Her Exactitude. “Moreover, it accords with our ethical imperative. Luckily, our imperative is based upon experience, rather than upon artifacts or scriptures, so we are not likely to be thrown into disorganization by judgments made centuries ago. We do not assert as true anything which we have not proven or seen proven by others. Thus, we never claimed that we were the center either of the universe or of a deity’s attention. While we do not deny deity, we do not presume to understand it, plea bargain with it, or tell others what shape it takes. It does make life easier.”"

"“You’re pro-life,” Dink commented. Briess widened the slit of his mouth into an excruciating smile. “No, my friend, I’m merely anti-woman. I was born in the wrong system. Once female life expectancy exceeded that of men in the U.S., it was obvious we were doing something wrong.”"

"“It could be any way at all by the will of Aitun,” snapped Chiddy. Aitun lets everything happen that can happen! It is up to intelligence to select!”"

"“A lot of things they speak of doing are things many humans have wanted to do but have never been able to muster a mandate to get them done. Things like legalizing drugs to take out the profit motive. Or paying teachers the way we do athletes, depending on how effective they are. Or getting rid of weapons whose only purpose is to kill people.” “Is a mandate necessary?” “If you’re going to overcome an economic incentive, yes.” “Logic has no part?” “No part at all. People can see the problem, they’re not stupid, but they can’t influence the legislators the way money can. Even when bad situations go on and on until the people are desperate for a correction, even when they threaten legislators with voting them out, the money still prevails.” “It is hard for me to see how this could happen.” Chad said, “The legislators react to a problem by writing a law, let’s say to put repeat drunk drivers in jail. The liquor industry objects, because they don’t like a lot of discussion about drunkenness, it hurts their image. The legislators react by amending the law to create a commission to study how best to jail drunk drivers. Then, when the budget bills come along, they fund only the commission. The appointees to the commission include representatives of the liquor industry. “This allows the legislators to claim success, because the law got voted in. The liquor industry also claims success, because they made sure the law won’t work. “The next step is to hire a lot of people to work for the commission, many of whom are also liquor industry supporters, and the commission begins to issue long, complicated, vaguely pointless reports. Now, however, there are jobs involved, and legislators can’t get rid of jobs, even useless ones. “Then, repeatedly, the lawmakers amend the law further, tweaking this and changing that, but always adding more jobs—until we have a bureaucratic monstrosity that’s in the business of helping the liquor industry prevent legislation against drunk drivers. That’s the way our Forestry Service got to be owned by the lumbermen, and our DEA got to be owned by the drug cartels, welfare got to be owned by a social work hierarchy, and schools got to be owned by professional educationalists. None of them work, because that’s not what they’re designed to do.”"

"Picture this: A mountain splintering the sky like a broken bone, its western precipice plummeting onto jumbled scree."

"Many men of importance were gathered there to be seen talking with other men of importance, resulting in an abundance of conspicuous but immaterial discourse."

"Meanwhile they discussed What It All Meant, some considering the sign a threat and others a blessing, each according to his nature."

"Long ago, the people of the world cried out for help. In the reaches of heaven their cry was heard, and a Visitor came in answer to it. The Visitor began helping immediately, but secretly. Now the visitor intends to be known to the people of the world and the people of the world must deal with that knowledge."

"We are to be needed, but I'm not sure for what."

"You asked for wisdom? Hear these words. Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality."

"I am myself, though from moment to moment something else seems to be looking on. Whatever will be required of me, however, can best be done if I remember who I am."

"Being an immortal doesn’t matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it."

"Personal beliefs are unarguable, even if the other side has all the facts."

"She had grown through loss and confusion into a girl who lived almost entirely inside her head, taking refuge in the places she created there, not so much repulsed by others’ reality as unable to perceive it."

"“They were always telling me their way is the only way to go!” “Oh, no, my dear. No, not at all. So long as it harms no one else, one’s own way is always preferable.”"

"Sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake does no one any good!"

"“No matter who I ask, they answer out of the Dicta! Even when it doesn’t fit.” “Doing such is not a new thing. In the former world, there were people who said all truth was contained in this or that holy book, this or that holy image, these or those holy beliefs. No matter how complicated their world became, no matter how much it changed, the only answers permitted were those that grew ever more tortuous and convoluted.” “Until?” “Until, some say, God turned his back on them for their failure to use the minds they had been given.”"

"Since they were not in the Dicta, knowledge of them would be considered evidence of heresy, or of imagination, which was almost as bad."

"For the last several years, Jerry has been much moved by “spiritual” things. Though it’s a word Jerry and his friends use quite comfortably, I’ve never been able to define it. It means non-material things, certainly, but also, non-intellectual, non-measurable, non-factual things. For his friend Marie, it’s a belief in angels, but her husband thinks it’s the feeling he gets when he sits naked in a hot spring, watching the stars."

"“What you’ve just said is totally unorthodox, Colonel Doctor. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d been touched by Scientism!” “Ah. Scientism. One of the heresies. How would you define Scientism, Captain?” “A heretical belief that men once did the things you’ve mentioned through their own efforts, without angelic assistance. The Dicta teaches us that our ancestors depended upon angels for their power, just as we will when we rediscover The Art.”"

"Janet snarled, “Nell, who made you the arbiter of what’s Right and wrong or wrong?” Nell thumped the table. “I’m not making a moral judgment, I’m making a pragmatic one! Before the Happening, the world was full of people, and we were using up the Earth’s resources at a fantastic rate. Somehow we felt we’d find some other world before we used up this one, and going to space was a spectator sport. That game’s over. We’re not going anywhere! Therefore, all the attitudes that led to use-up-the-world-and-leave-it-behind are wrong for us, and whatever attitudes keep the Earth fit for what people and animals are left is right for us, and I defy you to come up with any better definition.”"

"The Regime says a lot of things, nine-tenths of it lies and the other tenth wishful thinking."

"Call me either Colonel or Doctor. Hearing both titles gives me a split personality, the two philosophies differing so widely. It is medicine’s philosophy that lives should be saved, of all sorts. It is our military’s philosophy that as long as a few cells are kept alive, actual lives may be dispensed with. A few inches of gut in a bottle is not, to my mind, a life, no matter what theological contortions one puts oneself through."

"“I know so little,” she murmured. “Better admit you are up to your neck in ignorance than stand upon a pinnacle of misinformation,” he said firmly."

"If a society thinks it needs weapons, it must accept killing. If it thinks it needs violent men, it must accept rapine and assault."

"I’ve come to believe, from experience and reading and what I’ve learned on the outside, that the Regime—I suppose really, one might say any regime—is rather like a pot of porridge. If vigorously stirred every now and then, it can be a nourishing if not always tasty staple, but if left on the heat unstirred for some time it becomes increasing stodgy. If left untended, it can char into an immovable solid, like coal. Thereafter, it is incapable of being stirred, incapable of providing nourishment. When a regime is like that, citizens have to resort to bribery or lawbreaking to do quite necessary things like digging wells or fixing roads, thus joining corruption to congealment."

"I suspect there’s little difference between whim and inspiration at the beginning of any chain of events. It’s what happens later that tells us which is which."

"The Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back piecemeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand."

"Those of us from Chasm started calling it the Visitor because that's a relatively comfortable label. It implies the stay is temporary, that the thing will go away. We think the Visitor must be part of a race of beings who live in space, though we're guessing at that. We also postulate that they hitch rides on bits of space trash that are moving somewhere, like the huge one that came at us. Anyhow, the Visitor is getting closer by the day."

"Once the Regime said that one living cell is a life, real living became irrelevant."

"The sergeant was braver than most, and stupider—the two qualities often going hand in hand."

"“Magic!” cried the demon. “Miracle! What difference between the two?” “There is no difference at all,” said Galenor. “Except that people allow themselves to believe an event if it’s called a miracle while disdaining the same event if it’s called magic. Or vice versa."

"Life arises naturally; where life is, death is, joy is, pain is. Where joy and pain are, ecstasy and horror are, all part of the pattern. They occur as night and day occur on a whirling planet. They are not individually willed into being and shot at persons like arrows. Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts…"

"“Humans are unique in holding their gods so cheap they peck at them like pigeons, constantly intruding upon them with prayer! Prayer from all sides of every conflict, prayer before each contest, during every issue. Private prayer, public prayer, shepherded prayer baa-ed from congregation, sports prayer before games, prayer parroted and prayer spontaneous, endless instructions to god, endless...plockutta. “‘Intercede for me and solve my problems; give me, grant us; hear the words I’m saying; suspend the laws of nature in this instance; cure her; save him; don’t let them; listen to me; do this!’” The Visitor sighed. “Beneath it, one hears devils’ laughter.”"

"Each race creates its own devils. You had so many that they specialized. Devils of racial hatred, devils of greed and violence. Devils who killed their own people in orgies of blood. Devils who bombed clinics, devils who bombed school buses, devils who bombed other devils. I got to know every one of them by name. As soon as I arrived, I sent my monsters out to kill them all. They had tarnished my reputation, and though I have lavished much care on mankind, vengeance is mine."

"“This place is a godland, you may call me god. Small g, for I am not proud. We are a race evolving in this Creation to serve the Maker of it. We act as temporary deities during the childhood of individual peoples and planets. I was the midwife who brought forth this world, who stirred the primordial ooze, and noted the life that crawled up from the sea. Our race is not unlike yours, but I am very old, and you are still very young. ”We come and go. I came to teach your people language. I raised up oracles, whispered to soothsayers, wove bright visions for sorcerers, and spoke marvels to your alchemists. I came again to raise up prophets in the Real One’s name: Bruno, Galileo, Newton, Fermi...” The doctor interrupted, “The Real One? Who?” ”The Being whom I worship. The Ultimate who stands apart from time. The Deity some men think they are addressing when they pray with words. The Real One doesn’t even perceive words. If IT did, imagine what IT would have to listen to! The Real One sees only the pattern of what is, where it begins and where it comes to rest. The only prayer IT perceives is action. “I don’t understand that,” said Nell, stubbornly. “An example from your old world, Nell. A child being shot and everyone weeping. What does the Real One see? IT sees the maker and making of a device that kills, the device itself, the selling of the device that kills, the buying of the device that kills, the placement of it near the child, the occurrence, the death. Only actions enter the pattern the Real One sees. What is. What was done. IT perceives neither intentions nor remorse.” Nell said angrily, “What do you mean, what is?” The small god seemed to shift uneasily on its pedestal. “What is, is! Reality. Nature. The laws of a Universe that contains all things. Expansion and contraction, matter and anti-matter, light and dark, joy and sorrow, ecstacy and horror, supernovas and black holes, euphoria and pain, governing and politics, life and death. All the goads and all the stumbling blocks that force intelligence to grow by conquering.” “Conquering what?” asked Arnole, his hand on Nell’s arm. “Anything. Stink, or disease, or hatred. Pain, bugs, or brambles. The shortness of life or the frailty of age.” “Why not just leave those things out?” Dismé protested. “It’s been tried. If you give a being only feelgood-joy-life, nothing happens. Dinosaurs lived here for hundreds of millions of years in feelgood-joy-life, and at the end of it they had conquered nothing."

"“Even when you went to the moon, you didn’t go in search of truth. Oh, you said it was to learn about the universe, but you really went because you were playing a dominance game with another country. Once the other side no longer played the game, you only pretended to go on while actually you started the long slide back into magic and miracles.” Nell said angrily, “Miracles are religion!” ”It doesn’t matter what name you call it,” said the small god. “Magic or miracle, sorcery or religion, it’s all the same.”"

"Aside from earning their livings, what did your people do, mostly? Games. Sports. Casinos. Loud machines that went fast. Shopping. Lawsuits blaming other for whatever went wrong. What did they believe in? Conspiracy theories. Racial superiority. Heroes with superpowers. Faith healers. God-loves-you religions. State-supported lotteries. All that enormous energy expended to conquer nothing at all, stadia full of people watching no conquering going on. For every scientist or person in government who really tried to conquer, there were a thousand people buying lottery tickets, drinking beer, watching football, and growing old."

"Your leaders worshipped the greed devil when they sold their votes and influence to spread bad stuff; they worshipped the power devil when they valued votes over the health of the planet; they made a pretence of mercy and justice by advocating human rights while they sucked up to dominance devils whose law was torture and whose rule was the enslavement of women."

"“As everybody’s god, what will you do?” The doctor demanded. “You mean immediately?” asked the small god. “I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that will inevitably be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay...Also, I will be capricious. I’ll reward and punish arbitrarily. I’ll peek through bedroom windows and admonish what I see there, sometimes one thing, sometimes the opposite. I will have purposes men know nothing of, and when men begin to catch on to them, I will change them. This will convince some of your people that I am unreliable...Occasionally, I will do a conspicuous miracle to save one dying child while a thousand children starve elsewhere. This will convince sensible people I am perverse, and they will curse my name. Be sure to recruit those who do, they’ll be invaluable. Only by repudiating both devils and small gods will they ever know the Real One. I will be a sham, but not a snob. I will let every man, woman, or child, no matter how greedy or wicked, claim to have a personal relationship with me. In other words, I will be as arbitrary, inconsistent, ignorant, pushy, and common as humans are, and what more have they ever wanted in a god?” “The truth!” cried the doctor and Arnole, simultaneously... “Oh, tush, they never wanted anything of the kind. Creation has the truth written all over it—the age of the universe, the history of the world—but nine-tenths of mankind either don’t know it or think it’s a sham, because it isn’t what their book or their prophet says, and it isn’t cozy or manipulable enough.” ”My people wanted truth,” said Nell, stiffly. “My friends.” “They were a minority. Not many years before the Happening, one of your country’s largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions, as I well know, for I chose many parts of it from among the scrolls and epistles that were lying around in caves here and there. They’re correct that a god picked out the material; they just have the wrong god doing it.”"

"The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along."

"The space began to move around them as the being on her plinth receded. The splintered world hurtled toward them as though they were in a kaleidoscope, images whirling to join, spinning outward to disintegrate, vortices of jagged light, horizons of endless time, pinwheels of splendor that rushed at them and receded through which they heard the small god cry, "You will not see me soon again. It is not fitting that gods, however small, consort casually with their servants. I leave you as Guardians for all that live on this world.""

"Arnole had time for analysis. “It is interesting,” he said to himself, “that this small god implied devils were made of ignorance, for I have always believed this to be true. Ignorance perpetuates itself just as knowledge does. Men write false documents, they preach false doctrine, and those beliefs survive to inspire wickedness in later generations. They are like the spells woven by wizards, lying in wait for the credulous to find them and uses them. Conversely, some men write and teach the truth, only to be declared heretic by the wicked. In such cases, evil has the advantage, for it will do anything to suppress truth, but the good man limits what he will do to suppress falsehood. “One might almost make a rule of it: “Whoever declares another heretic is himself a devil. Whoever places a relic or artifact above justice, kindness, mercy, or truth is himself a devil and the thing elevated is a work of evil magic.”"

"To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn't that sound familiar?"

"I mentioned that the small god said she brought the asteroid because of what man had become, and they retorted that man might not have become that if we had been relentless in our education of our young people and had not perpetuated ignorance under the guise of cultural sensitivity and the politically correct."

"He calls it the university of the Real One, and it teaches only things that are known to be true, which means it is largely devoted to mathematics and sciences."

"Ideas oozed out of books like magma out of volcanoes."

"“We have a membership provided the ISTO doesn’t declare all Earthians a barbarian people.” “I don’t know what that means,” I persisted, even though this wasn’t strictly part of the subject. Father gritted his teeth. “ISTO recognizes four types of creatures: civilized, semicivilized, barbarians, and animals. Civilized people know about, care about, and protect their environments. Semicivilized people know and care, but can’t do anything…” “Why not?” Mother said, “Because something prevents their acting in their own self-interest. Public apathy. Commercial interference. Religious opposition. Governmental corruption. The Gentherans say the humans have a lot of that.” Father frowned at her and went on. “Barbarians know but don’t care about their worlds, and animals don’t even know.”"

"“The Gentherans said too many Earthians were in fact barbarians who didn’t care what happened to Earth because they believed they’d be off in some lovely afterlife by that time.” “Would they be?” I asked, wonderstruck this idea. “I sincerely doubt it,” Mother snapped."

"“Though many mortals speak with authority concerning what their Members want—“Our Father wants us to sacrifice a bullock,” “Kali demands we garrote a passerby”—the desires and demands of the gods are always determined by the desires and demands of the people. Whatever the prophet or priesthood comes up with, the gods parrot."

"“That is the god of jihad,” she said. “That is the god of crusades. They are identical except for their names.”"

"By the time mortal races leave their home planets, many of their gods have already amalgamated with one another. Small tribal godlets are often thrust together through shared execrations. All Death-Honor-and-War gods, for example, are identical. The people may fly different flags, but their gods are happy to drink blood from both sides of the battle."

"The Gardener says that mortals often pass laws they cannot enforce in order to be seen as “strong,” or “determined,” even though they know the laws will not solve the problem."

"Think of that, Joziré! A court dedicated to pure justice, one that can overrule the law! They didn’t even have one of those back on old Earth!"

"It did not take long to find out that Earth was no different from Phobos. People on Earth engaged in ritual repetition; most of them thought as little as possible; most of them occupied themselves with things and events that were not very important. Amusement stage dramas were the same as the ones I had seen on Phobos. All music had been so extensively filtered, corrected, and augmented by technology that it all sounded alike. Singing voices were improved by electronic means, as were the faces, the bodies, and the dramatic ability of actors and actresses. No one was plain; no one was allowed to be ugly; no one was very different from anyone else. In school, the stupid students got the same grades as the smart ones except for the tiny secret marks the educational archivists made in their records – in case a VIP needed a truthful reference."

"The only thing rarer than louts who think is louts who read."

"The use of destructive, noisy machinery for recreational purposes must become anathema to humans, as unthinkable as eating one’s young."

"Great wealth breeds great arrogance."

"Mr. Weathereye had always said that civility could not possibly be resented by any civilized person; that if resentment were offered, it was a sure sign of loutdom."

"Along the way, all meaning was lost except for verbal signals, the kind of signals any animal species develops in order to stay in touch with its own kind, call others to a feeding spot, or alert others to danger. Every linguist should know that language must be used to be retained, and the compilers of this report have warned that human language on Earth is also being reduced. As humans become more crowded, they become less tolerant of variety. To fit into a crowd, people must be similar, and Earth’s population today is a vat of homogeneity with only a pretense of choice remaining. One may pick model x with one curlicue or model y with three, the tasteless brown cracker or the tasteless yellow cracker, the actual difference in either case being nil. Any real choice among things of unlike value might lead to disparity, which leads to conflict. Ideas also contribute to disparity, and therefore in crowded populations ideas must be restricted to the least controversial, the least interesting. Children all receive the same grades in school. Workers all receive the same pay. Clothing is similar; Foods are identical; and with the passage of all distinctions the words for them also pass."

"That symbol always reminded me of that historic educational effort called “No child left behind,” which actually meant “No child gets ahead,” for compliance meant dumbing everything down so no one would learn more than the least capable. “Enough for all” really meant “Too little for everybody.”"

"“That’s why we train women judges here at Temple. It is the nature of men to make rules for everything and to play complicated games with them. For them, the game is more important than justice. “Ordinary people prefer justice. They prefer that things be taken case by case, they prefer an attempt at justice over the rules of law, for they know that pure law is often used by the clever to victimize the innocent.”"

"They learn nothing, for they’re convinced they know everything that matters."

"“Anything interesting in the paper?” “Some tragedy, some comedy, nothing that’ll matter in a hundred years,” I said."

"“We have replanted five percent of the Brazilian desert where at one time jungles grew in leaf mold containing thousands of microorganisms atop hard, in fertile soil. When the trees were burned, so was the leaf mold, along with the microorganisms. The stony, sterile ground was barren. On these barrens we have planted hearty ‘starvation’-type coverage: many thorns, a few leaves. When these have had a few decades to accumulate organic detritus, we will plant slightly less hearty things at their roots. After another few decades, we can plant the next generation, and so on. It will take over two hundred years for each acre to achieve fifteen percent of the organic mass it once held. It will take a millennium or more for each acre to achieve anything approaching the fertile growth that was its glory as one of Earth’s chief oxygenators.”"

"The people of Earth did not understand that humans were part of a worldwide organism, that something as tiny as a cluster of bacteria could mean the difference between life and death for every living thing, the difference between a functioning, flourishing planet and a desolation."

"Earth had always operated on a continuous-growth model that requires a poverty class. Sustainable models require productive work by all members and are quite different."

"“The human problem?” I asked, somewhat offended. She put her arm around me. “Forgive me, Gretamara, but your race as a whole has the unfailing habit of fouling its nest, killing its original planet, and doing its best to kill any others to which it is moved. Because we love and admire the human race for its many good qualities, we call this not ‘the human condition,’ meaning an irrevocable state, but ‘the human problem,’ one we wish to solve. The effort has gone on for some millennia, without result, and some of those involved in the effort are beginning to believe it is a waste of time and treasure.”"

"And that very strong one with the hammer. That might be Thor. “Actually,” the Gardener murmured,” he is Thor, Hercules, Apollo, Gilgamesh, Adonis, Osiris, Krishna, virtually every young male deity known for strength, beauty, and intrepidity, just as my colleague, Mr. Weathereye, is Odin, Jupiter, Jove, Allah, Jehovah, or any other ancient male deity known for wisdom, power, and prescience. And the old woman there, Lady Badness, is Erda, Norn, Moira, Sophia, the wisewoman who can detect the pattern in the weavings of happenstance before mankind here’s the shuttle coming.” “I’m named for her?” asked Sophia. “For her, yes. And I, Gardener, am also Demeter, Cybele, Freya, Earth Mother, Corn Goddess, a thousand names of female deities wise in the ways of growing things, solicitous of women and children, caretakers of the beasts of the field and the woods. Some of us Members are sizable, for many mortals, including humans, believe in strength, and power, and nurture, and wisdom.” “What are all those hunched-up things?” asked Sophia. The Gardener shook her head.” Sophia, those are the gods many humans prefer. They are hunched from ages of sitting on peoples shoulders, whispering encouragement.” “But they’re tiny!” she said, in disbelief. “Many humans prefer tiny gods,” said the Gardener. “Tiny gods of limited preoccupations…” “Limited to what?” I demanded. “To mankind, of course. And to each believer, particularly. Each human wants god to be his or her best friend, and it’s easier to imagine god being your best friend if he is a tiny little god interested only in a tiny world that’s only a kind of vestibule to an exclusive little heaven.” “Some of them are yelling,” said Sophia. “Oh, yes. Those are hellfire gods. Since there is no supernatural hell, they never really send anyone there, but their sources get enormous pleasure, thinking about it.”"

"“There,” Gardener said, pointing. “That little female one. Its name is Oh-pity-me. It cannot see the sun for the daylight nor the stars for the darkness, and it is worshipped by a surprising number of people."

"“Are those gods real?” I demanded. “I am one of them, Gretamara. We exist, but we are not real in the sense that a tree is real or a rock is real. If all the people in the universe were gone, the rock or tree would still be there, but we deities exist only while our people do.”"

"You don’t remember your first ancestors. You have no memory of ninety-nine percent of what makes you what you are! Instead you have comfy baby-stories you tell yourselves to explain why you’re not good people. What sin you committed or how you didn’t do with this god or that god told you. Instead of learning how not to be bad, you learn how to be forgiven and carried off to heaven. Most of you find it easier to believe the baby-stories than to learn from history and science, because it takes brains and hard study to understand history and science, but the stories are simple and comfy. People who want things easy and comfy resent people who study things. They teach their children the comfy stories and tell them not to worry about studying, just buy a ticket to go to heaven, and gradually, everyone becomes as ignorant as everyone else. It’s happened time after time on Earth."

"Human worlds are always awash in superstition, only a stubborn elite proof against it."

"Fear and superstition always follow the unseen, the unknown, the whispered of."

"“So that’s a magical world down there?” asked Bamber. Falija replied in an astonished voice, “No, of course it’s not magical. It’s completely real. It simply has a lot of lifeforms that you’re unfamiliar with.” Glory asked, “What do you mean, it’s not magical, it’s real?” “It’s a real world. It has real qualities. Up is always up and down is always down. Fruit falls from a tree, it doesn’t float to the sky. Creatures are born in this world, and grow up and eventually die. What’s true today is also true tomorrow. “If this were a magical world, all those things would be subject to could have by anyone who had power or could command it by spell or enchantment. Magical worlds can’t exist in our universe because their rules change constantly, and there’s no difference between evil and good. Power is power, and everyone does what they can get away with.” “I always thought magic was sort of nice,” said Glory. Falija’s ears drooped. “Humans are fascinated with magic. Your people like to believe in powers that will break all the laws of the universe, just for you.” Falija shivered."

"“Sit down, Grandma,” Glory urged. “You’re very pale. This is all very weird and strange, and you’re allergic to strange.”"

"The place displayed luxury without comfort, ostentation without art. I hated it."

"We had both learned from the Gardener that old vengeance is like old cake: still seeming sweet, but so dry that one invariably chokes on it."

"Old gods sometimes do that in their retirement. They become galactic social workers, self-appointed do-gooders."

"Something in their history has moved them to patience. Wise leaders do not go to war with enemies, not even evil enemies, unless they have thought it through to the end."

"For those impervious to history, only sterilization and quarantine are efficacious."

"If creation is important to something or someone or is going to become important, then all subcreations of it are also important. Everything is important. There is nothing so unimportant you can ignore it or destroy it with complete impunity. Your senses are part of the "everything." Seeing is important. Smelling is important. Hearing is important. Everything is important and you have to look at, study, get involved with everything, and you have to believe what you find out, and test, and finally prove! None of this nonsense about not believing in fossils because God was just playing around in order to confuse us. If you ignore the evidence of your (dare one say God-given) senses, if you define myth as reality, and if you claim divine revelation allows you to destroy any part of creation, you have committed absolute evil. Do we have any way of knowing exactly what is intended for the universe to be or become? No, but given the age and complexity of the whole shebang, we can be fairly sure creation is important."

"We have several races of beings that speak on this one planet. We have many and varying types of intelligence on this one planet. Therefore, tendencies that encourage intelligence, language, and a continuing search for information may very well be in accordance with the purpose of the universe. And contrariwise, all systems that discourage intelligence, language, and a continuing search for information are anti-existence, death-dealing, and evil. <!-- Any religion that says, "This is the creed, you have to believe this, you have to accept it regardless of the fact it makes no sense, or you are a heretic!" is an evil religion that commits evil things like overpopulating the planet, groping little boys, torturing people to make them confess, and marrying thirteen-year-old girls off to men old enough to be their grandfathers."

"The Inquisition, by defining and limiting knowledge, was evil. The Taliban, by defining truth and refusing girls an education, is evil. Any religion that says it knows the one and only truth is evil, because it limits knowledge. Any political body that says it owns the truth is evil. Same reason. Any repressive regime that seeks to control exploration and experimentation is evil. Same reason. Any regime that defines truth as a set of beliefs and occurrences that cannot be questioned, that can neither be demonstrated nor proven is not only evil but ridiculous. This includes all mythologies, miracles, etc. because, if creation happened for a reason, if it was done by God, you'd better believe every part of it, including intelligence, was done for a reason ascertainable, eventually, by intelligence. We would not follow and adore a ruler who lied and tortured. Why would we worship a God who did either? God doesn't lie and he/she/it doesn't fool around! Shutting down inquiry is evil. Causing pain purposefully for no reason is evil. Enjoying causing pain by shutting down inquiry is an absolute evil."

"I never read an author twice if I can't trust him or her to make it come out right. I never read an author twice if he writes the kind of books where everyone and everything is in tension from page one to the last paragraph of the last page, like that dreadful TV show, 24. Tension is something I have plenty of in life. I don't need it elsewhere."

"Every villain or villainous activity I have ever written about is a person or an activity that has actually lived or taken place. I invent nothing. When I wrote in Raising the Stones about the slavery practiced by one race and their reasons for it, those reasons were taken verbatim from arguments written in defense of Negro slavery by southern slave owners. Watch bullies at school. See how they delight in causing pain. See how little is done to change them. Imagine them grown, elected, put into power. They do grow, they are elected, they are put into power."

"I say the entities that are named as gods by Earthians are imagined into being by Earthians as personal helper-buddies, justifiers, threateners (my god can beat up your god). They don't "run on" anything any more than a mirror image "runs on" anything. They merely reflect what people want them to be. "I want to have more children than my brother does, thus proving I'm a better man than he is, so my god tells me I should have a big family." "I want to screw women, so my god is going to give me seventy virgins I can screw for all eternity." The "gods" in The Margarets who could really do anything were actually an old, highly evolved race of real people. The others were only reflections. The real God, who may really exist, is outside all that, perhaps watching closely, perhaps merely asleep for a few trillion years while the experiment runs out. We — thee and me as individuals — will never know that God, though after a few trillion years, the universe as a whole may come to understand that God."

"Look at Mother Teresa. She spent her whole life being holy. She didn't benefit anyone in any real sense. She didn't work on stopping disease, helping poverty, doing anything that would relieve the condition of her countrymen. She just went around the city, picked up dying people, and took care of them while they died. It was a good thing, no doubt, but it meant no betterment, no progress, no help, no relief from pain. She longed to be holy. She wanted to be a saint. Now she's a saint. Salk isn't a saint. But he did more for the human race than Mother Teresa did. He didn't long to be holy, which meant having faith, not asking questions, doing something unpleasant without thought or complaint. He longed to do good, which meant finding things out, asking hard questions, and thinking hard, deep thoughts. Goodness and holiness are two different things, unfortunately."

"I went through a Sheri Tepper phase for a while. Someone introduced me to her work and I got busy and I read a lot of her novels."

"The magic of music is so strong, getting stronger, it should break any shackle of another art."

"The romantics of the 19th century thought that the artist is at war with society, and must be destroyed by it eventually; this is the theme of all of Hoffmann's stories. I suggested -- in The Outsider and the subsequent five books of the 'cycle' -- that the fault lies partly with the artist, for preferring pessimism and self-pity to serious thought, and that the 'outsider' must eventually learn to accept his position as a spiritual leader of society. The church once provided the link between 'outsiders' and society, standing for the world of values, of 'meanings; beyond the present. The artists of the 19th century found themselves without this visible symbol of non-material values, and were, as Hoffmann says, frequently destroyed by society, or by their own destiny of standing outside it. I concluded that they must learn to stand alone, to be twice as strong, for half the problems of our civilization are due to 'the treason of the intellectual', their tendency to opt out and collapse in self-pity"

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

"I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

"I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble."

"Yes, he said. I busted him and he busted me. That's fair, ain't it? The boy was still silent, calmly incredulous. No, Sylder went on, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it."

"The man sat watching the road, the weedstem twirling in his mouth and the threadthin shadow of it going long and short upon his face like a sundial's hand beneath a sun berserk."

"And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare."

"Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said."

"Yes mam. I'm sorry you've had such troubles. Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death."

"And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief."

"What discordant vespers do the tinker's goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of the day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema."

"Drovers were racing brokenly across the milling hogs like wind through grass until a whole echelon of them careering up the outer flank forsook the land and faired into space with torn cries. Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now upreared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom."

"Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian."

"I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away."

"It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)"

"Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls. (p.128)"

"In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. (p.130)"

"He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he is sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their blood in history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him? (p.147)"

"Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath. (p.149)"

"You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said. The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one. (p.158)"

"He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death. (p.162)"

"If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only."

"The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all."

"When he looked back at the primadonna she was watching them through the spyglasses. As if she might better assess them in that way where they set forth upon the shadowbanded road, the coming twilight. Inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more."

"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."

"Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case."

"Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy."

"You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value."

"He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?"

"He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new."

"The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again."

"He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof."

"If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?"

"In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept."

"The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them."

"The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one."

"Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty."

"Black: Belief aint like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to a well of belief itself and then you dont have to look no further. There aint no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everything he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the mornin' you get to put your feet on a real floor and you dont have to worry about where it come from. But if he didnt then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everything by that same light. If light is is. Includin yourself. One question fits all."

"White: I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to... that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels."

"White: You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."

"She slept and sleeping she dreamt that she was running after a train with her brother running along the cinderpath and in the morning she put that in her letter. We were running after the train Bobby and it was drawing away from us into the night and the lights were dimming away in the darkness and we were stumbling along the track and I wanted to stop but you took my hand and in the dream we knew that we had to keep the train in sight or we would lose it. That following the track would not help us. We were holding hands and we were running and then I woke up and it was day."

"In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?"

"He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be. After she left the quarry he sat alone until the small flames in their tins had guttered out one by one. Then just the dark of the countryside, the silence of it. The faint drone of a truck out on the highway."

"He wrote in his little black book by the light of the oil lamp. Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you. We pour water upon the child and name it. Not to fix it in our hearts but in our clutches. The daughters of men sit in half darkened closets inscribing messages upon their arms with razorblades and sleep is no part of their life."

"He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete. The ages of men stretching grave to grave. An accounting on a slate. Blood, darkness. The washing of dead children on a board. The stone laminations of the world with their fossil prints unreckonable in form and number. My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling. The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train. He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods."

"Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue."

"Do you really believe in physics?"

": - I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean."

"The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy."

"When Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all math is a tautology, Russell gave up on math."

": —Is it true?"

": —Russell said so."

"Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief."

"Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished."

"The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation."

"Your life is set upon you like a dog."

"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose."

"The days are long but the years are short."

"You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often."

"My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow."

"Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music."

"If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought."

"As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared."

"I thought about David Bohm. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics — largely because Einstein had half convinced him that the theory was faulty. He wanted to get down his thoughts on paper. By the time he'd finished the book he didn't believe in the theory."

"A group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of the creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike."

"Do you believe in an afterlife?"

": —I dont believe in this one."

": —Do you?"

": —I’ve no idea. It strikes me as extremely unlikely. But again the probability is not zero."

"How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good"

": —I’m not sure I see how that would work."

": —Neither does anybody else. Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory."

"Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking."

"I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."

"In my College days I had been Auditor of the Historical Society — a post which corresponds to the Presidency of the Union in Oxford or Cambridge — and had got medals, or certificates, for History, Composition and Oratory. I had been President of the Philosophical Society; had got Honours in pure mathematics. I had won numerous silver cups for races of various kinds. I had played for years in the University football team, where I had received the honour of a “cap”! I was physically immensely strong. In fact I feel justified in saying I represented in my own person something of that aim of university education mens sana in corpore sano"

"Do not grieve for her! Who knows, but she may have found the joy she sought? Love and patience are all that make for happiness in this world; or in the world of the past or of the future; of the living or the dead. She dreamed her dream; and that is all that any of us can ask."

"We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things."

"Listen to them — the children of the night. What music they make."

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."

"Despair has its own calms."

"One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever."

"You think to baffle me, you—with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's."

"Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured."

"Logically speaking, even the life of an actor has no preface. He begins, and that is all. And such beginning is usually obscure; but faintly remembered at the best. Art is a completion; not merely a history of endeavour. It is only when completeness has been obtained that the beginnings of endeavour gain importance, and that the steps by which it has been won assume any shape of permanent interest. After all, the struggle for supremacy is so universal that the matters of hope and difficulty of one person are hardly of general interest. When the individual has won out from the huddle of strife, the means and steps of his succeeding become of interest, either historically or in the educational aspect — but not before. From every life there may be a lesson to some one; but in the teeming millions of humanity such lessons can but seldom have any general or exhaustive force. The mere din of strife is too incessant for any individual sound to carry far. Fame, who rides in higher atmosphere, can alone make her purpose heard. Well did the framers of picturesque idea understand their work when in her hand they put a symbolic trumpet."

"The fame of an actor is won in minutes and seconds, not in years. The latter are only helpful in the recurrence of opportunities; in the possibilities of repetition. It is not feasible, therefore, adequately to record the progress of his work. Indeed that work in its perfection cannot be recorded; words are, and can be, but faint suggestions of awakened emotion. The student of history can, after all, but accept in matters evanescent the judgment of contemporary experience. Of such, the weight of evidence can at best incline in one direction; and that tendency is not susceptible of further proof. So much, then, for the work of art that is not plastic and permanent. There remains therefore but the artist. Of him the other arts can make record in so far as external appearance goes. Nay, more, the genius of sculptor or painter can suggest — with an understanding as subtle as that of the sun-rays which on sensitive media can depict what cannot be seen by the eye — the existence of these inner forces and qualities whence accomplished works of any kind proceed. It is to such art that we look for the teaching of our eyes. Modern science can record something of the actualities of voice and tone. Writers of force and skill and judgment can convey abstract ideas of controlling forces and purposes; of thwarting passions; of embarrassing weaknesses; of all the bundle of inconsistencies which make up an item of concrete humanity. From all these may be derived some consistent idea of individuality. This individuality is at once the ideal and the objective of portraiture."

"I could not but be struck by the strangers. The lady was a big, handsome blonde woman, clever-looking and capable. But the man riveted my attention. He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance. I did not have much time to analyse the face; the bustle of arrival prevented that. But an instant was enough to make up my mind about him. We separated in the carriage after cordial wishes that we might meet again. When we were on the platform, I asked Irving: "Who is that man?" "Why," he said, " I thought I introduced you!" "So you did, but you did not mention the names of the others!" He looked at me for an instant and said inquiringly as though something had struck him: "Tell me, why do you want to know?" "Because," I answered, "I never saw any one like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!" "You are right!" he said. "But I thought you knew him. That is Burton — Captain Burton who went to Mecca!"

"My first impression of the man as of steel was consolidated and enhanced. He told us, amongst other things, of the work he had in hand. Three great books were partially done. The translation of the Arabian Nights, the metrical translation of Camoëns, and the Book of the Sword. These were all works of vast magnitude and requiring endless research. But he lived to complete them all."

"Burton had a most vivid way of putting things — especially of the East. He had both a fine imaginative power and a memory richly stored not only from study but from personal experience. As he talked, fancy seemed to run riot in its alluring power; and the whole world of thought seemed to flame with gorgeous colour. Burton knew the East. Its brilliant dawns and sunsets; its rich tropic vegetation, and its arid fiery deserts; its cool, dark mosques and temples; its crowded bazaars; its narrow streets; its windows guarded for out-looking and from in-looking eyes; the pride and swagger of its passionate men, and the mysteries of its veiled women; its romances; its beauty; its horrors."

"Go home, Johann — Walpurgis nacht doesn't concern Englishmen."

"THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST"

"Be careful of my guest — his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune."

"As to its effect, I had no adequate words. I can only say that after a few seconds of stony silence following his collapse I burst out into something like a violent fit of hysterics…. In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul! From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men."

"Much has been said of his relation to Henry Irving, but I wonder how many were really aware of the whole depth and significance of that association. Bram seemed to give up his life to it. .. I say without any hesitation that never have I seen, never do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another."

"Tennyson had at times that lifting of the upper lip which shows the canine tooth, and which is so marked an indication of militant instinct."

"He have done this alone; all alone! from a ruin tomb in a forgotten land. What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him?"

"gothics are slow. I had somebody that had never read Dracula before and they read it and they told me, “It’s just a bunch of journal entries. It’s such a boring piece of crap.” And I said, “Yes, it is.” Well, not just journal entries, but like train tape timetables and lots of stuff. It does tell a story, and it does get kind of creepy, but they wanted the vampire jumping out on page two and biting into somebody, and that just doesn’t happen."

"To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse."

"Give me enough words, enough attendant gravity, and I might fall into myself forever, crushed infinitely flat by my own hubris. It'd be a neat trick, I admit. I'd pay to see it — but from a safe distance, of course."

"I've seen so goddamn much — I've seen so much that there's no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can't be anything left that's more terrible than what has come before."

"Orpheus' mistake wasn't that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot's wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked."

"I sincerely hope I'm not as big a fool as that. Whatever else I may be, I like to think that I'm not an idiot."

"The divine is always abominable."

"And speaking of Massachusetts, I just heard on CNN that the first human cloning has been successfully performed there. I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of cloning humans (or anything else), but I have to question the need for any technology that produces more of us. Making babies is about the only thing for which our species seems to display a more or less universal talent. We hardly need any help."

"I was thinking, earlier, how there's this stigma attached to "writing for money" and how odd that is, as though writing is akin to sex (another "creative" act?) and writing for money is akin to prostitution in the minds of so many people. Whoring with adjectives, so to speak. Do I give good prose? Look up the definition of "hack." So, there must be the perception that writing, like the priesthood, comes with some higher purpose in tow. Getting paid well somehow sullies the purer cause. I've heard writers dismiss something or another that they've written by explaining, "Oh, yes, I know that sucked, but I only wrote it because they paid me so much money." And then we might even forgive them a piece of crap, because we have a sensible explanation. That wasn't a real orgasm. I was only faking the plot. Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Hollywood."

"The world wants oatmeal. It is not my job to give the world oatmeal. It is my job not to be a hack. It is my job to try to make the world chew, lest its lazy jaw muscles atrophy and its collective mandible withers and all its teeth fall out. It is my job, as a writer, to give the world toffee and peanut brittle and tough steak and celery. I write peanut butter sandwiches, not oatmeal. And every time some dolt whines, "I'm confused" or "I don't understand" or "This doesn't make any sense," I should smile and know that I'm doing my job. Not because it is my job to be opaque, but because it is not my job to be transparent."

"A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg."

"I'm not kidding, and I'm not being hyperbolic — sometimes I hate this thing I do more than I could ever say. Sometimes, it seems that I spend my days dragging people whose only crime is that I am their creator through the filth and pain and degradation of my own despicable imagination. Where is the good in this? Where is the resolution? Where is the sense of it? If I had even a scintilla of belief in a "higher" intelligence of any sort, days like yesterday (and, by extension, today) would, on the one hand, give me some degree of sympathy for the idiot dieties unable to craft a better universe, and, on the other hand, it makes me grateful I have no such beliefs, because the anger I would have for that "higher" whatever would be inexpressible. And I cannot imagine that there are actually people out there — self-professed "horror" writers — who are trying to elicit these emotions in others, who are purposefully driving their characters on through all the futile, dead-end nightmares that might be devised. I would not do this. I swear I would not do this, if I could find other words in me."

"No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few exceptions, a brutal, ugly, and unrelentingly difficult existence. It is a grind, no matter how much you may love to write or feel driven to tell stories. Personal demons aside, you will encounter at almost every turn no shortage of idiots and shitheels upon whom you must depend to get your work to readers. Occasionally, there will be a fortunate aberration: a wonderful, brilliant editor, or a copyeditor who doesn't try to express herhimitself vicariously by attempting to rewrite your work, or an agent who busts hisherits ass for you. You may even be so fortunate as to encounter a publisher who cares more about herhisits authors than the bottom line. Those things do happen. But don't ever fucking count on it. If you come to this life, and if you "make it" and can actually eek out some sort of living writing, you will likely learn these things for yourselves. Plenty of people will tell you I'm full of shit on this account. And you are certainly free to listen to whomever you please. But after fourteen years as a full-time writer, during which time I have had great successes and profound failures, seen modest fortune and considerable poverty and everything in-between, been appreciated and reviled, awarded and ignored, helped and hindered — one thing remains true. It's a tough row to hoe, as my Grandfather Ramey would have said. And you do yourself and all working authors a disservice if you dare believe otherwise."

"On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day."

"There are many words and phrases that should be forever kept out of the hands of book reviewers. It's sad, but true. And one of these is "self-indulgent." And this is one of those things that strikes me very odd, like reviewers accusing an author of writing in a way that seems "artificial" or "self-conscious." It is, of course, a necessary prerequisite of fiction that one employ the artifice of language and that one exist in an intensely self-conscious state. Same with "self-indulgent." What could possibly be more self-indulgent than the act of writing fantastic fiction? The author is indulging her- or himself in the expression of the fantasy, and, likewise, the readers are indulging themselves in the luxury of someone else's fantasy. I've never written a story that wasn't self-indulgent. Neither has any other fantasy or sf author. We indulge our interests, our obsessions, and assume that someone out there will feel as passionately about X as we do."

"Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst."

"I want to build vast machines of light and darkness, intricate mechanisms within mechanisms, a progression of gears and cogs and pistons each working to its own end as well as that of the Greater Device. That's what I see in my head. But, too often, I sense that many readers want nothing more complex or challenging than wind-up toys. It's dispiriting."

"The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she — the author — should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary."

"Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap."

"Isn't there some great, grim irony in the fact that the whole country gets a day off work in honor of a man who struggled against and died to end oppression, even after having re-elected one of the greatest would-be oppressors of the last century? And that the threat of freedom for a minority may have been what finally tipped the electoral scales in Dominar Bush's favor? Yes, I think that's what it is, a great, grim irony. King said, "No one is free until we are all free." Somehow, the Reverend Bernice King has missed that part, as have so many other Americans. All or nothing. Personally, I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should have been suspended this year in recognition of Bush's second term. A nation cannot simultaneously pat itself on the back for granting this group of people freedom and strive to deny freedom to this other group. Or, rather, it can, but it should not be permitted to do so. The vacation has not been earned because the work is not finished."

"All I have to do is make you see this. This one particular thing here. That's all. And sometimes it's impossible. Sometimes, I know the best odds I can hope for are a thousand to one. You'll see what you see, what your life has conditioned you to see upon encountering that combination of words, not what I want or need you to see. Fiction writing is like making films for the blind."

"[On test audiences and alternate endings on DVDs] Seeing these two endings, knowing that the studio most likely chose the one that would close the film after polling test audiences, makes me a little ill. What if I did that with my novels? What would you think of me, if I were to so subvert the act of storytelling and mythmaking in an effort to make more money (by, I might add, perverting democracy)? Okay, at the end of Low Red Moon, I can kill Chance, or I can let her live. Which ending do you prefer? Check the box, and let us know. Should Orpheus make it back to the surface without looking to see if Eurydice is truly following him, or should he look? Should the mouse pull the thorn from the lion's paw, or should he mind his own damned business? I can only hope that it is self-evident that this process is as alien and destructive to art as anything ever could be. Yes, I'm sure it makes people more money, and money is nice, but it has very little to do with telling good and true and useful stories."

"At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right. There are only finer and lesser degrees of refinement, and even those are probably subjective. You might think it's perfect for a time, but read it a year or five years later, and you'll see you were mistaken. There's always something I can make better, every time I read one of my stories. Usually there are dozens of somethings. And I once thought this wasn't true, that a story reached a certain point and beyond that point you were only changing things, making them different, not making them better. Indeed, I thought, beyond a point, you risk screwing it all up. I don't think that anymore. You risk screwing it all up right from the start, and no story is ever as perfect as it can be. Perfection is always one or two polishes away from the writer."

"Art should never be a slave to commerce, but for all working artists that's exactly what it must be."

"Yesterday was an utter waste. An artist, of whatever stripe, has only so many days, to write or paint or dance or whatever, and each one wasted is that much that will never be accomplished."

"Sometimes, I think that the most alien thing to mankind is mankind itself. The real aliens live next door or across the border or somewhere overseas. Each man and woman defines the world about them, creating a set of those things which they consider "normal" and "good" and "evil" and "sympathetic" and "likable," and these are damned indomitable walls. They are high and thick, and it is the task of the writer to penetrate or scale them. To break in. To shatter preconceptions. To force people to rethink cherished opinions and prejudices."

"I'm not sure if erotica should be angry and grim and terrifying and bitter, but it works for me. I rode my frustration. I kicked the bitch in the ribs until it spat up what I needed."

"Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe."

"If there must be resolution and explanation, it must be something worth its weight in mystery. Most times, I'd be content with the mystery."

"Basically, I wish I could read the way I used to read. I did not dissect as I read. I simply became immersed in the story and let it sweep me happily along. Now I cannot help but dissect. I try not to, but I do anyway. I cannot help but see "flaws" and all the ways I think I could have done this better. I would suspect that all writers are like this, to one degree or another. Writers are the gods of their universes, and we are never at a loss to suggest how some other god might better run herhisits universe/s. At least, this is true of me. It is one reason I read so much less fiction than I did fifteen years ago. And, actually, stage magic is not a bad metaphor for this problem I now have as a reader. I am precisely like a magician watching another magician's act. I should be suckered in with the rest of the crowd. I passionately desire to have the wool pulled over my eyes. Only it very rarely happens, as I'm too busy figuring out how it's all being done and how I could improve upon it … I just can't help but read it as a novelist. This is, from my perspective, unfortunate. I don't want to know how the trick works. I want to be amazed. I want to be convinced of the magic. But this is what I do. I spend my days gluing words together to try and fool other people. And I can't help but try to see how other writers, especially writers who have found more commercial success than have I, make it work. Sadly, I don't even find the mechanics & theory of fiction writing remotely interesting, which makes this doubly frustrating. It's just a reflex."

"Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus. And unlike science, art is not progressive. Personally, I have my doubts that science can be said to be genuinely progressive, but I'm pretty dammed certain that art is not. Which is not to say that it is not accumulative or accretionary. But the belief that sf writers are out there forecasting the future, that they have some social responsibility to do so, that's malarky, if you ask me. Writers of sf can only, at best, make educated guesses, and usually those guesses are wrong, and clumping together to form a consensus does not in any way insure against history unfolding in one of those other, unpredicted directions. People love to pick out the occasional instances where Jules Verne and William Gibson got it right; they rarely ever point fingers at their miscalls."

"I pondered exactly how future biographers would go about writing the biographies of authors without letters. It's not like email and "chat" and whatnot will fill the void. Online journals help a little, but they are not, generally, the truly honest sorts of things that letters were, and only a few authors keep them. I tried for years to keep up letter writing, but was defeated in the end by too many unreliable correspondents."

"Bad writing days are days when you mean to write and can't, or are interrupted so frequently that nothing gets done. I'm disheartened at how often I see the blogs of aspiring writers bemoaning how slowly a book or story is coming along. They have somehow gotten it in their heads that writing is a thing done quickly, efficiently, like an assembly line with lots of shiny robotic workers. The truth, of course, is that writing is usually slow, and inefficient, and more like trying to find a cube of brown Jello that someone's carelessly dropped into a pig sty. Five hundred words in a day is good. So is a thousand. Or fifteen hundred. A good writing day is a day when one has written well, and the word counts be damned. Finishing is not the goal. Doing the job well is the goal. And I say that as someone with no means of financial support but her writing, as someone who is woefully underpaid for her writing, and as someone with so many deadlines breathing down her neck that she can no longer tell one breather from the other. Sometimes, I forget this, that daily word counts are irrelevant, that writing is not a race to the finish line. One need only write well if one wishes to be a writer. A day when one does not do her best merely so that more may be written, that's a bad writing day."

"A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be."

"It has been my experience that many people actually believe that writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration. Maybe this is the source of that annoying "Where do you get your ideas from?" question. Maybe the people who believe writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration are the same people who ask that question, thinking — wrongly — that there's a trick of some sort involved. And if a writer would but tell them the trick, then they too would have access to the bottomless well of ideas and live in a state of perpetual inspiration. In my case, at least, there is no bottomless fucking well of ideas, and if I only wrote when I truly felt inspired, I'd starve and live in a cardboard box at the corner of Crack and Whore (which is to say, the corner of Ponce and Piedmont). But, that said, there does have to be a spark. What people ought to be asking me is "Where do you get those tiny, little infinitesimally faint sparks that you then somehow manage to blow up into ideas?" Of course, my answer would be, "I have no inkling whatsoever.""

"I cannot force it. I have never been able to force it. Like I've said before, writing is a wild magic (at least it is for me). It comes when it's ready, and then, if I'm lucky, I have some small say in where it goes and what it does. This is one reason I can't comprehend why some writers talk so much about "craft." Crafts are something you learn how to do. I never learned to write. I write better now than I did ten years ago, and far better than I did twenty years ago, but I'm not exactly sure why. To me, it is an almost ineffable thing. I try to explain what it is I do, and how it is I do it … on those extremely rare occasions when I try to explain … and, for me, it's like grasping at air. I have no craft talk, no theory, no dos and don'ts, no discernible process. I sit here in my chair at my desk in front of the iMac, and when I'm lucky, it happens. It's not so much that I think the "writing as craft" people are wrong. They can't be wrong, not if they are crafting stories and know they are crafting stories. But I don't craft stories. So, for me, we have here these two different paradigms. I spark. They craft. Two incommensurable world views. I cannot explain to them what it is that I do. I cannot even explain it to myself. And I cannot comprehend what they do."

"We are indeed living at the end of the Golden Age of Mankind, or at least the end of this particular human civilization. That almost everything we take for granted today may, only a couple of decades farther along, seem entirely remarkable, that our most mundane artefacts and toys will stand as incredible examples of luxury and excess. That all of this will pass away, and the "simplest" bits of our day-to-day lives will become miracles of a half-remembered past. A past which will be responsible for that future-present misery. It is difficult to force myself through the trivial routine of my days when these thoughts are front and center. It is difficult to see beyond the veil they draw up about me and difficult to push it all aside long enough to write my silly little stories."

"I'm wondering how the new crop of teens and twentysomethings became so afraid of emotion and the expression thereof.* Did their parents teach them? Did they learn it somewhere else? Is this a spontaneous cultural phenomenon? Are they afraid of appearing weak? Is this capitalism streamlining the human psyche to be more useful by eliminating anything that might hamper productivity? Is it a sort of conformism? I don't know, but I could go the rest of my life and never again hear anyone whine about someone else being "emo," and it would be a Very Good Thing."

"Could anything be more inimical to art than a fear of emotion, or a fear of "excessive" emotion, or a reluctance to express emotion around others? No, of course not. Art can even best the weights of utter fucking ignorance and totalitarian repression, but it cannot survive emotional constipation. I want a T-shirt that says, "Art is Emo." We live in an age where people are more apt to believe a thing if they read it on a T-shirt."

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in."

"Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."

"Cocoa? Cocoa! Damn miserable puny stuff, fit for kittens and unwashed boys. Did Shakespeare drink cocoa?"

"Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children."

"One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. It had simply never occurred to me that these the millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: "Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker," she wrote sternly; "it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?""

"The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play."

"Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained."

""They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery." Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools", he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added petulantly."

"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said. "Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

"Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd."

"Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones."

""It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

"No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice."

"Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad."

"This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed."

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often tthought that with any luck at all I could have born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

"All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…""

"Shirley Jackson’s work The Haunting of Hill House may be the most delicate novel of terror ever written."

"The tension between socially acceptable housewifery and creative ambition is certainly easy to find in Jackson’s life, but it’s rather harder to locate in her fiction. There’s no question that, in her books, the house is a deeply ambiguous symbol—a place of warmth and security and also one of imprisonment and catastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jackson’s fair-seeming homes is not housework; it’s other people—husbands, neighbors, mothers, hellbent on squashing and consuming those they profess to care for. And what keeps women inside these ghastly places is not societal pressure, or a patriarchal jailer, but the demon in their own minds. In this sense, Jackson’s work is less an anticipation of second-wave feminism than a conversation with her female forebears in the gothic tradition. Her stories take the figure of the imprisoned "madwoman," as found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and make her the warder of her own jail."

"My mother was a writer. That's what she did. She loved nothing more than writing, though she certainly also loved her children, cooking, friends, cats, music, and playing bridge. I can picture her sitting on her beloved red kitchen stool, spiced meatballs simmering on the stove, making a shopping list — with scribbled asides of insight into or warnings for her characters in whatever novel she was working on."

"("Stanley Hyman did a tribute to his late wife Shirley Jackson and noted how surprised people were that the author of disturbing and grim fiction should be a wife and mother and an apparently happy one.") UKLG: Being a wife and mother is supposed to be a consuming occupation, therefore you couldn't do anything else. And then the fact that Shirley Jackson wrote the kind of books she did. I suppose people think: I wonder if she strangled her children."

"As the subtitles of Jackson’s biographies echo each other—demons, haunted—so both biographies present a near-identical portrait of her as daughter, wife, mother, writer: these roles inextricably knotted together through Jackson’s adult life, often to the point of near-unbearable pressure and stress. Jackson’s patrician, socially conscious, and woundingly censorious mother, Geraldine Bugbee, was the great-great-granddaughter of a wealthy San Francisco architect; clearly the model for the nightmare mother-figures in Jackson’s fiction, particularly the embittered invalid-mother of Hill House, Geraldine persisted in criticizing and belittling Jackson long after she had acquired national renown as a writer."

"It’s as if I drifted into this situation. I didn’t ever think about fighting or doing anything risky at all, not until the war came along. I agreed it was necessary, but that seemed obvious; everybody thought so, everybody I knew, anyway. And volunteering, agreeing to take part; that too seemed... natural. I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me that it might entail privation and suffering. Am I as stupid as those throughout history—those I’ve always despised and pitied—who’ve marched off to war, heads full of noble notions and expectations of easy glory, only to die screaming and torn in the mud?"

"There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means."

"“Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’ “If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again. “You know; living. Is it worth all the... bother?” “No.” “No?” “No, I don’t ever wonder about it.” “Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath. “I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.” “Not important?” “It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”"

"I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it."

"We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder."

"“Nothing is sacred to you, Mr. Munro. You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise. You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.” “So, because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in... science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as... worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?”"

"It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away."

"Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present."

"And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet... Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious."

"Of course they aren’t ready for it, of course we’ll spoil the place. Are they any more ready for World War Three? You seriously think we could mess the place up more than they’re doing at the moment? When they’re not actually out slaughtering each other they’re inventing ingenious new ways to massacre each other more efficiently in the future, and when they’re not doing that they’re committing speciescide, from the Amazon to Borneo... or filling the seas with shit, or the air, or the land. They could hardly make a better job of vandalizing their own planet if we gave them lessons."

"I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked... but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity."

"An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place."

"Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it."

"I looked at Li. “An argument? All right; you—anybody—taking command of the ship is like a flea taking over control of a human... maybe even like a bacteria in their saliva taking them over.” “But why should it command itself? We made it; it didn’t make us.” “So? And anyway we didn’t make it; other machines made it... and even they only started it off; it mostly made itself. But anyway, you’d have to go back... I don’t know how many thousand generations of its ancestors before you found the last computer or spaceship built directly by any of our ancestors. Even if this mythical ‘we’ had built it, it’s still zillions of times smarter than we are. Would you let an ant tell you what to do?” “Bacterium? Flea? Ant? Make up your mind.” “Oh go away and de-scale a mountain or something, you silly man.” “But we started all this; if it hadn’t been for us—” “And who started us? Some glop of goo on another rock-ball? A super-nova? The big bang? What’s starting something got to do with it?”"

"On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system, which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves."

"It is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. Thus, while it takes Soviet Russia a vast amount of time and hard work to produce one inspired lunatic like Lysenko, the West can so arrange things that even the dullest farmer can see it makes more sense to burn his grain, melt his butter, and wash away the remains of his pulped vegetables with his tanks of unused wine than it does to actually sell the stuff to be consumed. And note that even if this mythical yokel did decide to sell the stuff, or even give it away—the Earthers have an even more devastating trick they can perform; they show you that those foods aren’t even needed anyway! They wouldn’t feed the least productive, most unimportant untouchable from Pradesh, tribesperson from Darfur, or peon from Rio Branco! The Earth has more than enough to feed all its inhabitants every day already! A truth so seemingly world-shattering one wonders that the oppressed of Earth don’t rise up in flames and anger yesterday! But they don’t, because they are so infected with the myth of self-interested advancement, or the poison of religion acceptance, they either only want to make their own way up the pile so they can shit upon everybody else, or actually feel grateful for the attention when their so-called betters shit on them! It is my contention that this is either an example of the most formidable and blissfully arrogant use of power and existing advantage... or scarcely credible stupidity."

"All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar of dialectic of dissent which—simply stated—dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seem often to baffle the military and political mind."

"While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once."

"Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration."

"Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot."

"That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting."

"Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible."

"The underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place."

"“Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza. “Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.”"

"“The war won’t end,” Aviger said. “It’ll just die away...I don’t think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they’ll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single units blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet...and that’s how it’ll end; probably they’ll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there’ll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever’s left of the galaxy, and there’ll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.”"

"“One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us—oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image. “You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us—even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters—it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerful: quite respectable adversaries, in fact.” “Hmm,” Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, “What were they called?” “Hmm,” Xoxarle rumbled. “Their name...” The Idiran pondered. “...I believe they were called the...the Fanch.” “Never heard of them,” Aviger said. “No, you wouldn’t have,” Xoxarle purred. “We annihilated them.”"

"“So it’s false.” “What isn’t?” “Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”"

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules."

"Empires are synonymous with centralized — if occasionally schismatized — hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through — usually — a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser — as a rule nominally independent — power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance."

"It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system."

"A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it."

"“Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone. “Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him. Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense."

"“You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.”"

"“One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh.” Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. “Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are—ha!”—Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe—“no more than robots!”"

"The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. “You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,” Hamin told him. Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment."

"“I’m very sorry,” the drone said, without a trace of contrition."

"He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain."

"The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass? Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle."

"He knew in his heart that there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always might have been right, and in the working out of whatever plan was followed, there was anyway always blood; better it was on their hands. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion."

"Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so (“Zakalwe,” she would say when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck and stare out from the rambunctious black tangle of her hair. “You have serious problems.” She would smile), But the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion."

"“I’m from out of town,” he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place."

"“I think I know the real reason.” “Which is?” “Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?” He knocked the glass on the table. “Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol.” He drank from the glass. “Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.”"

"He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her."

"What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of."

"“Let’s waste a little time, hmm?” “A nice euphemism, sir,” she mused distantly. He smiled. “Come and help me think of better ones.” She smiled and they both looked at each other. There was a long pause."

"“Well,” he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. “Here we are again.”"

"Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars."

"The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was. He could think of no more disastrous combination."

"There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation."

"What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?"

"“You’re a wicked man.” “Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.”"

"“These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?” “Believe me, it would be easy.”"

"He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders."

"He shrugged. “Whatever.” “Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.” “I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armor, dark against the dusk light, but not dead). “You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.” “It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.” “Oh well, thank you.” “It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling...(And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.” “Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain’t cynicism, what is?” Erens snorted. “Yes, excuses,” he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. “I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.” He looked at Erens. “You’ve attacked the wrong thing.”"

"In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots."

"He had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle. He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight."

"More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honor and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity."

"Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language."

"The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides."

"She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. “Is this as important as I think it is?” “Almost certainly much more so.” “Oh,” she said, “fuck.”"

"Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight —We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear"

"It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better...and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you...so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story."

"It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free, and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labor-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved. It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out... That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome."

"He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others."

"The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them."

"I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid."

"There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it."

"He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters."

"Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard."

"Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!"

"If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve."

"Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin? Better to die than risk that. Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not."

"That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual."

"I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters."

"Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting."

"Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated."

"She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid."

"How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails."

"The only sin is selfishness."

"That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by."

"Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time."

"“Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.”"

"No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!"

"“See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.”"

"Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders."

"You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing."

"Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher."

"“I believe in Providence, mistress.” “But when you say Providence, do you really mean god?” “No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,” I said."

"Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves."

"Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician."

"But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her."

"“I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.” “It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.”"

"“Quettil, it doesn’t matter,” the King said airily, waving one hand. “I prefer accuracy to flattery.”"

"People often behave badly when they are trying to prove a point."

"We only become beasts—we become worse than beasts—when we torment others."

"“One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.”"

"There is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but..."

"What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others."

"Perhaps my certainty is misplaced."

"I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess."

"Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought."

"We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes."

"The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability."

"Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?"

"Oh, yeah, this Ziller guy. Some spoiled, fur-rending liberal brat who thinks it’s his God-given duty to do the whining for those who can’t be bothered whining for themselves."

"“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.” Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”"

"“The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats...Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spend their existences attempting to conquer.”"

"I’m supposed to be at this sort of thing but even I find it pretty damn tedious at times. Still, receptions and parties are pan-cultural, so we’re told. I’ve never been sure whether to be reassured or appalled by that."

"“What, now?” “Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.”"

"Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight."

"“The point is: what happens in heaven?” “Unknowable wonderfulness?” “Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.” “Have you always thought that?” If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.” “There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being.” “That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic.” “And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe.” “Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong.” “There there are those who believe that the soul—” “Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That’s the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.”"

"Are you really as ignorant as you appear, Trelsen, or is this some sort of bizarre act, perhaps even meant to be amusing?"

"“Oh. I didn’t realise.” “Then you’re simply ignorant rather than malevolent. Congratulations.”"

"“You serious?” “I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.”"

"“But even if all the other stuff seems a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!” “Think of all that bullshit, the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness.”"

"“It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.” “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilisationally.”"

"“Elated? Pleased?” “Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly.”"

"Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too."

"Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?"

"Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do."

"There is an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it."

"When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy— ~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with."

"~ Want to know one ugly thought? ~ Are there not enough in the world already? ~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them. ~ If you say so. ~ One should always ask who has most to gain."

"Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being inferior, Choubris held."

"Holse had no idea how these things worked; he had never really bothered with religion, though he had always paid lip-service to the church for the sake of an easy life. He had long suspected that the WorldGod was just another convenient semi-fiction supporting the whole structure that sustained the rich and powerful in their privilege."

"“Fate, I tell you, if not the hand of the WorldGod itself…or whatever manipulatory appendage WorldGods possess. Anyway, the hand, metaphorically, of the WorldGod. Possibly.” “I think you underguess the workings of blind chance, sir.”"

"This version felt like the truth, she thought; close enough to the myths and legends of her own people, but less self-serving, less dramatically glorious, more equivocal in its moral implications."

"Ultimately the galaxy, indeed the sum of the universe in its entirety, was mostly nothing; average it all out and it made a pretty good vacuum. But within the foci of matter there were the systems, the stars and planets and habitats—what a cornucopia of life was there!"

"Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably—almost certainly—well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one’s own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant but of much less distressing immediacy. Context was indeed all, as her father had always insisted, but the greater context she was learning about acted to shrink the vast-seeming scale of the Eighth Level of Sursamen and all its wars, politics, disputes, struggles, tribulations and vexations until it all looked very far away and trivial indeed."

"Had they felt righteous, believing that the justice of their cause was being recognized by higher powers? For no doubt that was how they did think. It seemed to tyl Loesp everybody always thought they were right, and shared, too, the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true. They were all of them fools. There was no right and wrong, there was simply effectiveness and inability, might and weakness, cunning and gullibility. That he knew this was his advantage, but it was one of better understanding, not moral superiority—he had no delusions there."

"Ideas about what happened after you died varied even among the priestly cast. Primitives were able to have more straightforward religions because they didn’t know any better. Once you knew even a little of the reality of the situation in the outside universe, it all got a bit more complex: there were lots of aliens and they all had—or had once had—their own myths and religions. Some aliens were immortal; some had constructed their own fully functional afterlives, where the deceased—recorded, transcribed—ended up after death; some had made thinking machines that had their own sets of imponderable and semi-godlike powers; some just were gods, like the WorldGod, for example, and some had Sublimed, which itself was arguably a form of ascension to Godhead."

"Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution. A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever."

"Most men—most women, too, no doubt—lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high. In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it."

"“The source of my name,” the vehicle had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ’One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”"

"Really we’re no better—you’re no better—than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place."

"On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control. Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime, he’d held."

"Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries."

"I do what I can to make this war as humane in its inhumanity as I can, and in any case, I always know that however bad it may be, its sheer unnecessary awfulness at least helps guarantee that we are profoundly not in some designed and overseen universe and so have escaped the demeaning and demoralising fate of existing solely within some simulation."

"How goes your peace conference? Slowly. Having exhausted the possibilities of every other form of mass-murder they could possibly employ against each other, the natives now appear intent on boring each other to death. They may finally have discovered their true calling."

"We’ve filled the known universe with credulous idiots and we think we’ve sneakily contributed to our own safety by making it hard for anything untoward to creep in under our sensor coverage whereas in fact we’ve just made sure we harvest zillions of false positives and probably made the really serious shit harder to spot when it does eventually come flying."

"But are we within likelihood? Batra asked. Are we even still within the realm of anything other than paranoid lunacy?"

"He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion."

"He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You live there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.” “Well, for me it is—was—just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occurred. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”"

"Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgment to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words."

"It seemed at first glance like utter madness, yet it also, when one thought about it, appeared somehow no less implausible than any other explanation of how things truly were, and it had a sort of completeness about it that stifled argument. Assuming that every branching fork on the Universe map was taken randomly, all would still somehow be well; the likely things would always outnumber the unlikely and vastly outnumber the ludicrous, so as a rule things would happen much as one expected, with the occasional surprise and the very rare moment of utter incredulity. Pretty much as life generally was, in other words, in his experience. This was at once oddly satisfactory, mildly disappointing and strangely reassuring to Holse; fate was as fate was, and that was it. He immediately wondered how you could cheat."

"“Well, it all sounds most unpleasant,” Droffo said. He shook his head. “You hear all sorts of ridiculous stories; the workers are full of them. Too much drink, too little learning.” “No, more than that, sir,” Neguste told him. “These are facts.” “I think I might dispute that,” Droffo said. “All the same, sir, facts is facts. That itself’s a fact.”"

"He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behavior in some other field. Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, the rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse."

"A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?"

"I was toying with the idea of having to give up writing SF in the relatively near future, not because I wanted to but because I felt I’d have to. I think you get fewer ideas as you get older, and even though you get better at using and developing the few you do have, that’s not enough. Written SF relies heavily on ideas—you can write a perfectly good mainstream novel with no original ideas at all; you just have to tell an interesting story with interesting characters who have something to say. I don’t mean that as a criticism either: that encompasses perfectly valid, rich, and rewarding literary forms, but you can’t get away with that in science fiction. You have to have completely new ideas in there somewhere or it doesn’t really cut it as proper SF, and I was concerned about that."

"I think that humanity is just too tied up with the physical, anchored into the setting, if you like; who you are is actually about your entire position within the world you inhabit. Consciousness is like an abstract of that framework, it’s not just the bit in your head. AIs, yes; almost a given. I find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can’t have machines that exhibit consciousness; it’s a weird attitude unless you subscribe to the superstition that you have to have a supernatural soul to exhibit consciousness. Saying that the material world is incapable of forming a substrate for sentience or intelligence seems nonsense to me. We, as human beings, are made up of matter, and we exhibit intelligence (well… but anyway). We start from nothing bigger than a sperm and an egg, after all, and then just have lots more matter added. It’s astonishing and wonderful, and we in a sense, rightly talk about the miracle of birth. But for goodness’ sake, ultimately it’s just evolution and applied biochemistry. I believe matter can provide a home for consciousness—it seems perverse to argue that only biology is capable of this."

"Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now."

"Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special People – or whatever other nonsense had wandered into the most likely feverish mind of the enthusiast who had come up with the idea in the first place – at least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology."

"The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally."

"Most species capable of forming an opinion on the subject had a pretty high opinion of themselves, and most individuals in such species tended to think it was a matter of some considerable importance whether they personally survived or not. Faced with the inevitable struggles and iniquities attendant upon a primitive life, it could be argued that it was an either very gloomy, unimaginative, breathtakingly stoic or just plain dim species that didn’t come up with the idea that what could feel like an appallingly short, brutal and terrifying life was somehow not all there was to existence, and that a better one awaited them, personally and collectively – allowing for certain eligibility requirements – after death."

"Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever."

"“There are no guarantees in war,” Green said. “Oh, there are,” blue said quietly, looking away into the darkness. “It’s just that they guarantee death, destruction, suffering, heartache and remorse.”"

"Utility is seven-eighths Proximity."

"I hope I did not alarm you unduly with my little display last night. I get into character sometimes, find it hard to know when I’m causing distress. My apologies, if any are required. If not, then please accept them in any event, on account, to be banked against any future transgression."

"He was not what he appeared to be. He was beginning to wonder if he had ever been. The ice inside the water planet did not exist; neither did the water planet itself, nor the star it orbited nor the galaxy beyond nor anything of what appeared to be real no matter how far out you might think you were looking. Nor how far in you looked, either. Peer into anything closely enough and you would find only the same graininess that the Real exhibited; the smallest units of measurement were the same in both realms, whether it was of time or extent or mass. For some people, of course, this meant the Real itself was not really real, not in the sense of being genuinely the last un-simulated bedrock of actuality. According to this view everybody was already in a pre-existing simulation but simply unaware of it, and the faithful, accurate virtual worlds they were so proud of creating were just simulations within a simulation. That way though, arguably, madness lay. Or a kind of lassitude through acceptance that could be exploited. There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else’s ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered."

"Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck."

"Filhyn smiled. “Is it not always better to tell the truth though, Representative?” Errun looked at her, shook his head. “The truth? No matter what? For good or ill? Are you mad? I do hope you’re having a joke with me here, young lady….Don’t pretend you are so naive, Filhyn. The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channelled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.” He glared at her. “You are having a joke with me, aren’t you?” I might as well be, she thought. She wondered if she would finally be a real politician when she agreed with what Errun was saying."

"And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?"

"I’m negotiating a tricky course between the minefield of personal honesty on one side and the rocky coast of operational security on the other."

"I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?"

"I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it."

"“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.” “I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents.”"

"They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying."

"“You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar. “I beg your pardon?” “You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”"

"The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?” She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested."

"“I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.” “It would be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her."

"There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?"

"Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something."

"Hell was always for other people."

"Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth."

"Your position is perverse, farcical and as intellectually demeaning as it is morally destitute."

"“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm.… “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”"

"To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at."

"“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?” “Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus."

"The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well."

"Very quick deaths, even given that they would have been wired in and speeded up, if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human. Military personnel, babe; put themselves in harm’s way when they signed up. Just that the poor fuckers didn’t know it was my harm they were putting themselves in the way of. That’s war, doll; fairness comes excluded."

"Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly. Well, let them die. She’d compromise that far. Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that."

"I imagine my sorrow for your loss will prove containable."

"Don’t you think it’s hilarious when people think they’re being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we’d be in a hell of a fucking state."

"On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone."

"That was the thing about traitors: they were people who’d already changed their minds at least once."

"“His opinion was: ‘as a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”"

"Old equals sneaky."

"It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them."

"Never underestimate the sheer selfishness and stupidity of people."

"Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usual tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who – it took real blind faith not to accept – had made them up."

"The reaction was…mixed. Some people…hated it…others…really hated it."

"He, Tik…hated clashing, atonal music. He was basically…taking the piss, showing how…easy it was to write…how difficult to…listen to."

"One should never mistake pattern…for meaning."

"All of which might make things a little difficult operationally ∞ Understood. Life is limitations. ∞ And glibness, patently, on occasion, too. Your pardon, but I sense motions being gone through. ∞ On occasion, a superfluity of assiduousness can be vulgar."

"The Real – with its vast volumes of nothing between the planets, stars, systems and galaxies – was basically mostly vacuum; an averaged near-nothing incapable of true complexity due to its inescapable impoverishment of structure and the sheer overwhelming majority of nothingness over substance."

"“I shall take that as meaning I am not being too hopelessly foolish.” “You may still be, but then so may I.” “Yes, well, let’s not make a competition out of it.”"

"We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self."

"She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coincidence was probably enemy action."

"We really are taking this person’s existence as being a fact, not a myth? ∞ We are. It turns out that the myth which has been so carefully fostered is that his existence is mythical."

"Here’s some thing we don’t know but we can maybe find out, and it’s something that other people don’t want us to know. How much more seductive can you get?"

"“Anyway, it was all terribly well organised. Done with military precision.” He barked a laugh. “Better than that, actually; didn’t miss and hit their own people.”"

"“So why are we bothering?” “Just in case.” “Just in case what?” “Just in case it turns out to be something we should have bothered about. Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.”"

"“So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.” “True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?” “But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?” “No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean toward the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.”"

"“Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion bookending its utter triviality?” “Uh-huh,” she said. “Is this a rhetorical question?” “It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”"

"“I take comfort in the loyalty and faith you display towards your crew, Captain.” “My crew are loyal to me, Colonel; I am only loyal to the regiment and Gzilt. Also, faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.”"

"“The person concerned sounds – to be polite – eccentric.” “That would be polite to the point of over-generosity,” Tefwe said. “Awkward, tetchy and unreasonable might be closer to the truth.”"

"“I do believe my sarcasm-meter just twitched.” “A false positive, I fear. I was being entirely sincere.”"

"“That seems obsessive.” “Meticulous care can seem so to those unwilling to recognise it for its true worth.”"

"Ignorance can be interesting. ∞ Also fatal."

"Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination."

"Trust me; it is rarely an encouraging sign when the more apparel is removed, the less attractive a prospective sexual partner becomes."

"I have lived ten thousand years; I am used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying…one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually."

"Ah, dear. How fine the line is between acceptably defiant bravado and hopelessly delusional boasting."

"Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time."

"We all think we’re special, and in a way we are, but, at the same time, that feeling of being special is one of the things that’s common to us all, that unites us and makes us the same as each other. And when that feeling of…specialness is questioned, we feel threatened, naturally."

"The news channels are spasming, or frothing, or whatever it is they do."

"“I have buffed and polished my medals for decades of steady, dedicated watchfulness,” the marshal continued, clasping her hands behind her head as she leaned back and relaxed, legs crossed, “counted and re-counted my medals for outstanding work in simulations and exercises, carefully rearranged my medals for heroic bravery under virtual fire, and even found room for my many, many medals for exemplary valour in the face of fellow officers coveting the same promotions as I.”"

"“Have you always been so suspicious, Banstegeyn?” He looked at her, unsmiling. “No, I stumbled into a position of great power quite by accident.”"

"One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve."

"~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?"

"The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t."

"‘Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.’"

"“No, Geis, it doesn’t wear off. Like certain exotic diseases, and unlike love, synchroneurobonding is for life.” Geis lowered his eyes. “You weren’t always so cynical about love.” “As they say; ignorance pays.”"

"“Put plainly, I am not at liberty to divulge that information. There, it is said. Let us quickly move on from this unfortunate quantum of dissonance to the ground-state of accord which I trust will inform our future relationship.” “So you’re not going to tell me.” Sharrow nodded. “My dear lady,” the machine said, continuing to trundle after her. “Without saying so in so many words...correct.”"

"“How are you?” “I am here.” “Apart from that,” she said levelly. “There is no apart from that.”"

"Geis is a pain, Sharrow; the guy has a kind of charming facade but basically he’s a social inadequate whose real place in life is out mugging pensioners and cheating and beating on his girlfriends, and if he had three more names and been raised in a rookery in the The Meg rather than the nursery at house Tzant, that’s exactly what he would be doing. Instead he jumps out of the commercial equivalent of dark allies, strips companies and fucks their employees. He’s got no idea how real people work so he plays the market instead; he’s a rich kid who thinks the banks and courts and Corps are his construction set and he doesn’t want anybody else to play. He wants you the way he wants a sexy company, as a bauble, a scalp, something to display. Never get beholden to people like that, they’ll piss on you and then charge irrigation fees."

"“Anyway,” she said. “I’m sorry.” “Indeed. I can see contrition oozing from your every pore.”"

"Perhaps it was simply bad luck, but despite the fact the sheer capability of the Guns ought to have ensured their owner could effectively become ruler of the entire system, the weapons had invariably been the downfall of whoever had come into possession of them."

"“Aah...Yes, and how does madam wish to pay?” She slapped her credit card on the counter. “Eventually.”"

"“He might come in useful,” Cenuij said. “Yeah,” Zefla said. “So’s a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.”"

"She felt cold and battered and tired. This combat flying lark was supposed to have been just a little exotic incident in her life, something to tell people about when she was old. It had never been meant to get this important, never been planned to be this crucial and ghastly and hopeless. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be the end of everything. It couldn’t all just end, could it? Yes it could, she thought. Somehow she’d never really thought about it before, but yes; of course it could. She didn’t just accept it now; she knew it now. What a time to learn that particular lesson."

"“So,” he said to the monk, “you are of an Order which also despises the Great Infernal Wizard.” “Indeed, your gracious Majesty,” the monk said, looking down modestly at the carpet. His voice sounded respectful. “Our Belief—perhaps not so dissimilar from your own, more venerable and more widely followed creed, is that God is a Mad Scientist and we His experimental subjects, doomed forever to run the Maze of Life through apparently random and unjust punishments for meaningless and paltry rewards and no discernible good reason save His evil pleasure.”"

"When you have this sort of power, this responsibility, you can’t choose not to have it when the decisions become tough. You can’t afford to prevaricate or delegate; you have to be engaged. You can’t stay neutral; you can say you’re neutral, and try to act as though you are, but that neutrality will always help one side more than the other; that’s just the way power works...the leverage it exerts."

"“Details matter, though, don’t you think?” he said. “Sometimes what appear to be utterly inconsequential actions have the most enormous results. Chance makes the casual momentous. It is the fulcrum upon which the levers of action rest.”"

"Allow me to attenuate my portentousness for you."

"“I think,” she said carefully, “that perhaps too many people want things to be simple when they are not and cannot be. Encouraging that desire is seductive and rewarding, but also dangerous.”"

"“Choice,” he said heavily. A small smile disturbed his face. “We all think we have so much of that, don’t we?”"

"“Probably end up as one of those sordid cult leaders,” Zefla said after a while as they plodded into a bare area of the forest where a fire had left thousands of tree trunks standing upright and bare, black posts already surrounded by slender young trees forcing their way towards the sky around them. “You know, pedalling some weird concoction of re-tread gibberish and living in a palace while their followers sleep shifts and work the streets and give you this big flatline smile when you tell them where to stuff their tracts.”"

"Is there anything I can do? Just tell me. What can you do? Destroy things. All I can do is destroy things. It’s the only thing I’m any good at. Would you like me to destroy something? I want you to destroy everything! she screamed. Every fucking thing. All the evil men and compliant women, all the armies and companies and cults and faiths and orders and every stupid fucker in them! All of them! EVERYTHING!"

"Molgarin shook his head. “Oh dear,” he said. Something worse than cynicism must be abroad if even our aristocracy cannot accept that the rich and powerful may be motivated by purposes beyond acquiring yet more money and increased influence.” He put his head to one side, as though genuinely puzzled. “Can’t you see, Lady Sharrow? Once one has a certain amount of both, one turns to hobbies, or good works or philosophy. Some people become patrons of the arts or charities. Others may—charitably—be said to raise their own lives to the state of art, living as the common herd imagine they would live if they had the chance. And some of us attempt not merely to understand our history, but to influence meaningfully the course of the future.”"

"Hope could be more painful than despair."

"Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. Fate, I’m sick of it all... Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming."

"Not wide asleep; fast awake!"

"The King liked happy endings. You couldn’t blame the ancients for coming up with unhappy conclusions so often—they each spent all their single short life waiting either for oblivion or some absurd after-death torture—but that didn’t mean you had to stick faithfully to their paralyzed paradigms and ruin a good story with a depressing dénouement."

"“Is all she says true?” Asura whispered. “Ah,” Pieter said, smiling. “Now, that is a question. Let’s say it is all based on truth, but the facts are open to different interpretations from the one she supplies.”"

"“She seems very sincere,” Asura told Pieter. “A word with oddly positive connotations,” Peter said, nodding. “In my experience those who are most sincere are also the most morally suspect, as well as being incapable of producing or appreciating wit.”"

"“What happens happens,” continued the Resiler, “and cannot be made to unhappen. We are the equations; we cannot deny the algebra of the universe or the result it brings us. Die peacefully or in hysterics, with grace or with despair; it matters not. Prepare or ignore; it matters not. Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly.”"

"Gadfium found these meetings exasperating; they were supposed to keep people up to date with developments and help facilitate actions which might be of use in the current emergency, but so far all they ever seemed to do was pander to some of the attendees’ feelings of self-importance and produce vast amounts of talk that substituted for deeds rather than leading to them."

"“Want to bet on it?” “Thank you, no. I believe gambling to be a pastime for the weak-minded.”"

"The first time he saw somebody else he felt a mixture of emotions; fear, joy, expectation and a kind of disappointment that this wilderness was not his alone."

"“Even though we thought ourselves by now inured to the thoroughly reckless nature of our opponents, we have been profoundly shocked and disappointed to discover the completely irresponsible and utterly senseless depths—or should I say heights?”—the ambassadorial emissary showed his teeth and glanced around his appropriately appreciative team—“to which our previously at least ostensibly esteemed adversaries have been prepared to stoop to in their understandably increasingly desperate attempts to secure a victory in this outrageously prosecuted, thoroughly unfortunate and—on our part—wholly unprovoked dispute.”"

"Faith is the eye that sees nothing and rejoices in it."

"Itz a very strainje feelin wakin up alive when u wer fooly expectin 2 b ded."

"It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe."

"Being spoon-fed rosy-hued misinformation by the authorities was no more than people had come to expect—and preemptively discount. They only got suspicious when presented with what looked like the plain unvarnished truth."

"“Mr Taak,” he said, sitting back, sounding patient. “I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they are nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they will be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause.”"

"People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded."

"The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion,…It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact—according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes—be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilisations…. However, everybody—well, virtually everybody, obviously—quickly or eventually came around to the idea that a difference that made no difference wasn’t a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life."

"The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him."

"They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told."

"In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn’t really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour."

"Muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death—all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictiveness, just through the ghastly, banal working out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending."

"Everybody seemed to live as though things were always just about to get better, as though any bad times were just about to end, any time now, but they were usually wrong. Life ground on. Sometimes to the good, but often towards ill and always in the direction of death. Yet people acted as though death was just the biggest surprise—My, who put that there? Maybe that was the right way to treat it, of course. Maybe the sensible attitude was to act as though there had been nothing before one came to consciousness, and nothing would exist after one’s death, as though the whole universe was built around one’s own individual awareness. It was a working hypothesis, a useful half-truth."

"But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion? Was the reality, in fact, that nothing mattered and people were fools to think that anything did? Were the choices either despair, the rejection of reason for some idiot faith, or a sort of defensive solipsism?"

"As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up."

"The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way around)."

"Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money; all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic."

"Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion."

"Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a set-up, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss."

"There was some thing almost sublimely elegant, Sal thought, about how perfect a waste of time, people, resources and hard work the whole project had been."

"He was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel."

"Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get."

"I first encountered her near the beginning of that golden age which nobody noticed was happening at the time; I mean the long decade between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. If you wish to be pedantically exact about it, those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of America of September 11, 2001. One event symbolised the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one."

"Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating."

"I only tell them that because that’s what they like to hear, what they want to hear. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned, isn’t it? You can go a long way just telling people what they want to hear. Of course, you got to be careful, and you got to choose the right people, but still, know that I mean?"

"I mean, if you like feeling like an asset to your local community or something then fucking yahoo for you but don’t pretend you aren’t being exploited. People talk a lot about loyalty and being true to your roots and suchlike but that’s just bollocks, isn’t it? That’s one of the ways they make you do things that aren’t in your own best interest. Loyalty’s a mug’s game."

"Madame d’Ortolan was, she liked to think, of elegant middle age, though to the casual observer this might imply that she expected to live to be about one hundred and twenty."

"We live in an infinity of infinities, and we reshape our lives with every passing thought and each unconscious action, threading an ever-changing course through the myriad possibilities of existence. I lie here and ponder the events and decisions that led me to this point, the precise sequence of thoughts and actions that ended – for now – with me having nothing more constructive or urgent to do than think about those very eventualities."

"One of the wisest things anybody ever said to me was that if all you ever care about is money, money is all that will ever care for you."

"Beyond the beginning, nothing. At the beginning, a torrent of universes in a single timeless blink that is the mother and father of all explosions and is the opposite of an explosion, destroying nothing – destroying nothing but Nothing – but purely creating; snapping into existence the first semblance of order and chaos and the very idea of time, all at once."

"This is one reason that extremely wise, intelligent and knowledgeable people like myself bother to teach unutterably ignorant and callow people like yourselves when we could be happily feet-up in front of a big log fire reading a book, or talking urbanely amongst ourselves about the latest exciting idea or faculty gossip. There is, despite all the many, many appearances to the contrary, just a sliver of a chance that one of the better minds in this class might answer one of the questions that no one of my generation – despite the aforesaid wisdom, intelligence, et cetera – or any previous generation has been able to answer definitively."

"Scotland is wet and dreary. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Even the hills are mostly just big mounds, not proper mountains like the Alps or the Rockies. People will tell you it’s all romantic and rugged but I’ve yet to see the evidence. Even when it’s nice it’s covered in a cloud of these bastard little insects called midges so you have to stay inside anyway. Plus it’s full of Scots. Case rested."

"“As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.” “That’s when you were at university, was it?” He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?”"

"“I was being sarcastic.” “I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness.”"

"Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted."

"We had to assume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit."

"Whenever one was struck by a previously unlikely-seeming idea that had come to appear plausible or even sensible, one ought to apply that test: was it inherently any more likely than solipsism? If solipsism seemed to make just as much sense, then the idea could be dismissed."

"Now, our tutor pointed out that there was a weakness in the hard-line or extreme solipsist’s position which came down to the question why, if they were all that existed, they bothered to deceive themselves so? Why did it appear to the solipsistic entity that there was an external reality in the first place, and, more to the point, why this one specifically? Why did the solipsist appear to be constrained in any way by that supposedly physically non-existent and therefore utterly pliable reality?"

"It’s even more important to prosecute police who’ve broken the law than it is to prosecute anybody else, because otherwise nobody trusts the police."

"There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism."

"Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print."

"“It might, I suppose, lead to anarchy,” the Professore said profoundly, frowning somewhere towards the floor. “My dear Professore,” Madame d’Ortolan said, sighing, “we might greet anarchy with an open door, garland its brows, compared to what this might lead to, trust me.”"

"The bad guys tend to enjoy killing people, preferably in large numbers. The good guys – and girls – don’t; they get a buzz when infant mortality rates go down and life expectancy goes up. The bad guys like to tell people what to do, the good guys are happy to encourage people to make up their own minds. The bad guys like to keep the riches and the power to themselves and their cronies, the good guys want the money and power spread evenly, subject to the making-up-your-own-minds thing."

"Refusing to do a finite amount of good because you cannot do an infinite amount of good is a morally perverse position."

"Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard."

"People will generally make whatever compromises with the world they think necessary still to convince themselves that they are the most important thing in it."

"The old and powerful never want to let go. They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right. They are always wrong. Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say, its time in the sun, to sweep away the mistakes of the previous age while, if they’re lucky, retaining the advances made and the benefits accrued."

"It is an insane conceit. Power always drives to perpetuate itself, but this is a phenomenal extra distillation of idiocy. Only people already riddled with the internalised special pleading and self-importance that too much power brings could even start to imagine that this might be in any way sustainable."

"Madame d’Ortolan is one of those people – civilised on the surface, brutish underneath – who think themselves realists when they contemplate their own barbarism, and ascribe the same callousness to others. Making the assumption that everybody else is as ruthless as she is helps her live with her own inhumanity, though she would justify it as simple prudence. She knows how she would deal with somebody like herself: she’d kill them. So she assumes those who oppose her must be planning the same, or shortly will. Obviously, then, by her demented logic, she needs to kill them before they kill her. She will think through this psychotic escalation without any evidence that her opponents actually do intend her harm and she’ll pride herself on her disinterested practicality, probably even persuading herself that she bears those she has marked for death no personal ill will. It’s just politics."

"And don’t forget Goldman’s Law: nobody knows anything. Nobody knows what will work. That’s why they make so many remakes and Part Twos; what looks like lack of imagination is really down to too much, as paranoid execs visualise all the things that could go wrong with a brand new, untested idea. Going with something containing elements that definitely worked in the past removes some of the terrifying uncertainty."

"If you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to die. Sometimes."

"I won't miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven't dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault."

"'Destroying the whole universe' – an always tempting scenario when you realise in SF you can do anything – just seems too easy."

"There's so much I would have loved to have seen. The positives? I've been lucky in that I've had such a good life. Simple as that. My first 30 years were pretty damn good and the last 30, since I got published, have been absolutely brilliant. I've so many good friends and been part of a wonderful extended family and I'll leave behind a substantial body of work.""

""I've had a brilliant life and I think I've been more lucky than unlucky, even including the news of the cancer. I've written 29 books. I'm leaving a substantial body of work behind me. Whether that'll survive, who knows, but I can be quite proud of that and I am. There's none of the books that I'm not proud of. There's ones that I think I could have done better with. I still think Canal Dreams is the runt of the litter but I'm still very, very proud of The Wasp Factory."

"I don't have many regrets in my life. I suppose like a lot of men I've hurt women when I was being selfish or there's a real hurt towards ex-girlfriends that probably didn't need to have happened. That's probably the greatest series of regrets in my life. But other than that, and certainly professionally, not really, no."

"You never know, he thought. You just never know. You drift along, year after year, presuming certain values to be fixed; like being able to drive on a public thoroughfare without somebody trying to murder you. You came to depend on that sort of thing. Then something occurs and all bets are off. One shocking incident and all the years of logic and acceptance are displaced and, suddenly, the jungle is in front of you again. Man, part animal, part angel. Where had he come across that phrase? He shivered. It was entirely an animal in that truck out there."

"Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form."

"It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements."

"Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival. This quest for enlightenment must begin now. It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late."

"My wife and child and I were on a camping trip and we stopped in Virginia City. In the Opera House, I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?"

"I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I’ve written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death — the finest tribute any writer could receive. ... Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel."

"I hate it when something I’ve had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I’ve written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels."

"I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I’ve inspired a few people one way or another. Actually, the highlight of my life — which, of course, had an enormous influence on my writing career — was meeting Ruth Woodson on the beach in Santa Monica in 1951, falling in love with her, marrying her, and creating with her a family of four children; two sons, two daughters. My love for them, and growth because of them, made my writing life what it was. It’s a process I advocate for any would-be writer."

"I think we’re yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you that I don’t believe in the "supernatural," I believe in the "supernormal." To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it’s because we haven’t been able to understand it yet."

"I have come to the final judgment that I am not a man any longer. I am a figment, a concoction, an overblown invention born of low-grade whiskey and high-grade journalistic distortion; of street and saloon gossip and dime-novel bombast."

"I can get pissed off very easily."

"X — This day when it had light mother called me a retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch."

"It is a secret but I have pulled the chain out of the wall. I can see out the little window all I like."

"I thought what father said. Oh god he said. And only eight."

"This day father hit in the chain again before it had light. I have to try to pull it out again. He said I was bad to come upstairs. He said never do that again or he would beat me hard. That hurts."

"I am not so glad. All day it is cold in here. The chain comes slow out of the wall. And I have a bad anger with mother and father. I will show them. I will do what I did that once. I will screech and laugh loud. I will run on the walls. Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn't be nice to me. If they try to beat me again I'll hurt them. I will."

"Be this the final entry In mankind’s book of psalms He knit his shroud with atoms And dug his grave with bombs."

"The memory of you shall not perish with your untimely sepulture. You are, dear friend, not so much out of the game as playing on another field."

"They passed churches. People were packed inside them. They overflowed out onto the steps. “Poor fools,” Richard muttered, his hands still shaking. Norman took a deep breath. “I wish I was a poor fool,” he said. “A poor fool who could believe in something.” “Maybe,” Richard said. Then he added, “I’d rather spend the last day believing what I think is true.”"

"I don’t know why I thought that would help but I called him. I’d have called anyone just to have another mind to help. Parents are useless beings when they’re afraid for their children."

"They were strange, the facts about them: their staying inside by day, their avoidance of garlic, their death by stake, their reputed fear of crosses, their supposed dread of mirrors. Take that last, now. According to legend, they were invisible in mirrors, but he knew that was untrue. As untrue as the belief that they transformed themselves into bats. That was a superstition that logic, plus observation had easily disposed of. ‘It was equally foolish to believe that they could transform themselves into wolves. Without a doubt there were vampire dogs; he had seen and heard them outside his house at night. But they were only dogs."

"Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé; Summers’ idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century. Well, it was true."

"Well, it was true. ... True, he thought, but no one ever got the chance to know it. Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn’t be that — not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that. And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything."

"The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it."

"Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder."

"To his complete astonishment, he later found himself offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. It was a moment in which he felt a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second. Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog."

"Sometimes he had indulged in daydreams about finding someone. More often, though, he had tried to adjust to what he sincerely believed was the inevitable — that he was actually the only one left in the world. At least in as much of the world as he could ever hope to know."

"A woman. Alive. In the daylight. He stood, mouth partly open, gaping at the woman. She was young, he could see now as she came closer; probably in her twenties. She wore a wrinkled and dirty white dress. She was very tan, her hair was red. In the dead silence of the afternoon Neville thought he heard the crunch of her shoes in the long grass. I’ve gone mad. The words presented themselves abruptly. He felt less shock at that possibility than he did at the notion that she was real. He had, in fact, been vaguely preparing himself for just such a delusion. It seemed feasible. The man who died of thirst saw mirages of lakes. Why shouldn’t a man who thirsted for companionship see a woman walking in the sun?"

"All these years, he thought, dreaming about a companion. Now I meet one and the first thing I do is distrust her, treat her crudely and impatiently. And yet there was really nothing else he could do. He had accepted too long the proposition that he was the only normal person left. It didn’t matter that she looked normal. He’d seen too many of them lying in their coma that looked as healthy as she. They weren’t, though, and he knew it. The simple fact that she had been walking in the sunlight wasn’t enough to tip the scales on the side of trusting acceptance. He had doubted too long. His concept of the society had become ironbound. It was almost impossible for him to believe that there were others like him. And, after the first shock had diminished, all the dogma of his long years alone had asserted itself."

"His sex drive had diminished, had virtually disappeared. Salvation of the monk, he thought. The drive had to go sooner or later, or no normal man could dedicate himself to any life that excluded sex. Now, happily, he felt almost nothing; perhaps a hardly discernible stirring far beneath the rocky strata of abstinence. He was content to leave it at that. Especially since there was no certainty that Ruth was the companion he had waited for. Or even the certainty that he could allow her to live beyond tomorrow. Cure her? Curing was unlikely."

"I’m writing this note, though, because I want to save you if I can. When I was first given the job of spying on you, I had no feelings about your life. Because I did have a husband, Robert. You killed him. But now it’s different. I know now that you were just as much forced into your situation as we were forced into ours. We are infected. But you already know that. What you don’t understand yet is that we’re going to stay alive. We’ve found a way to do that and we’re going to set up society again slowly but surely. We’re going to do away with all those wretched creatures whom death has cheated. And, even though I pray otherwise, we may decide to kill you and those like you."

"Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. ... Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend."

"I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed."

"Well, why not? My dream woman has always been unavailable to me. What difference does a mere three-quarters of a century make?"

"To the human eye, stars move very slowly. Considering their relative motion, at this moment she and I might be looking up at virtually the same sight. She in 1896, me in 1971."

"Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point "in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.""

"I wish I were a boy again—unquestioning, with no need to analyze the moment. I had that feeling when I first stared at her photograph; I was emotionally overwhelmed. Now reality impinges. I’m pulled in two directions simultaneously—toward yearning and toward reason. It’s at times like this I hate the brain. It always builds more barriers than it can topple."

"I will try to be consistent, no longer oscillating like some planet that has lost its way. For, at long last, I have found my sun."

"What does that motto on the wall of your office say? That which you believe becomes your world."

"Heaven would never be heaven without you."

"Thank you...for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence."

"Let this hell be our heaven."

"As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide."

"They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it...It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful."

"What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one's own when self-pretense is no longer possible?"

"If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease...Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about the end of their lives."

"Does a man’s existence change in any way when he removes his overcoat? Neither does it change when death removes the overcoat of his body. He’s still the same person. No wiser. No happier. No better off. Exactly the same. "Death is merely continuation at another level.""

"I'd been in the densest part of the earth's aura he told me, an aqueous region which was the source of myths about the waters of Lethe, the River Styx."

"I've been very fortunate throughout my career. And I've been lucky enough to have worked with some great and talented people, like Price and Serling. I was just a part of the whole phenomenon coming together. They were exciting times that bubbled over with energy for all those involved."

"When I first joined my local library, I read endlessly. I immediately headed for the fantasy section, fairy tales, you name it. As a teen-ager, I read every novel by Kenneth Roberts, who wrote historical novels about the Revolutionary War period. My mother used to read to me. Heidi was one of my childhood favorites."

"I've always considered myself an offbeat writer. Out here in California they like to categorize, so I'm a science fiction writer. I wrote science fiction to break into the writing business. My love is fantasy. I wrote one of my early novels in four days sitting in a closet which I'd converted into an office, using an old Smith-Corona that my parents had given me for Christmas when I was 12."

"George Romero filmed an homage to the book, and he called it Night of the Living Dead. Homage means I can make the picture and I don't have to pay you for your book. As a teen-ager I saw the movie "Dracula," and it occurred to me that if one vampire was scary, a whole world populated by vampires would be really scary."

"All through the years, I've had many interests. I always wanted to write a swashbuckler; I still do. I love Westerns. I wrote a western called "Journal of the Gun Years," which won the Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. It had been written some time ago and rejected by every publisher, perhaps because I had been cast in the science fiction mold. I finished writing a combination western and horror story indigenous to the period. And horror takes many forms: Indians had their own superstitions based on things that they didn't understand. In a way, I like to be confusing by combining genres. I've always been fascinated by parapsychology, and I think that we've all lived before. In "The Path" I've explored that and a few other age-old questions like why are we here and what's our purpose in life."

"To me, I don't even think of life after death. To me, life after death and reincarnation are just slices of the pie. Life is a huge wheel and it goes around and around, and life after death is just a segment of that. It comes down to spiritual growth. I think that we keep coming back until we learn what we need to learn, until we get it right. I think we've all lived hundreds, maybe thousands of times. That which you think becomes your world. It's only when we're alive and in this world that we have the chance to progress. From the state of the world today, we haven't made much progress."

"Life is a risk; so is writing. You have to love it."

"Matheson gets closer to his characters than anyone else in the field of fantasy today. ... You don’t read a Matheson story — you experience it."

"He has many … virtues, notably an unusual agility in trick prose and trick construction and a too-little-recognized (or exercised) skill on offtrail humor; but his great strength is his power to take a reader inside a character or a situation."

"I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson. Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me."

"While Mr. Matheson's name is not as recognizable as that of Mr. King, perhaps no author living is as responsible for chilling a generation with tantalizing nightmare visions born of Golden Age television. Together with Rod Serling, Mr. Matheson wrote many of the classic Twilight Zone episodes for the original CBS series, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "Little Girl Lost" and "Third From the Sun.""

"I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend."

"“What’s the matter with you? Got a bellyache or something?” “No, sir. I’ve been thinking.” “Does it hurt that much?”"

"Well, that is a valuable addition to the sum total of our knowledge. Our minds are now enriched by the thought that an anonymous individual may be presented with a futile object for an indefinable purpose when he reaches his unknown destination."

"“It’s your right to refuse to believe. That’s freedom, isn’t it?” “Up to a point. A man has duties. He’s no right to refuse those.” “No?” She raised tantalizing eyebrows, delicately curved. “Who defines those duties—himself, or somebody else?” “His superiors, most times.” “No man is superior to another. No man has the right to define another man’s duties.” She paused, eyeing him speculatively. “If anyone on Terra exercises such idiotic power, it is only because idiots permit him. They fear freedom. They prefer to be told. They like being ordered around. What men!”"

"Time—the older you get the faster it goes."

"“I was thinking,” Harrison explained. “I approve of that,” put in His Excellency. He lugged a couple of huge tomes our of the wall-shelves, began to thumb rapidly through them. “Do plenty of thinking whenever you’ve the chance and it will become a habit. It will get easier and easier as time rolls on. In fact, a day may come when it can be done without pain.”"

"Any chance of accidentally dropping our cargo of bureaucrats overboard on the way back? A misfortune like that might benefit the spaceways, if not humanity."

"“Anyway, one soon loses appreciation of the value of something gained for nothing, one becomes bored by getting it for the mere asking.” “I don’t,” assured Zalumar. “I like it, I love it.” “Every day I see windows full of gold watches,” said Lakin. “They tire me. I have a gold watch which I obtained by demanding it. I don’t want fifty gold watches. I don’t even want two of them. So what use are all the others to me?”"

"Appearances aren’t always what they seem."

"Fander tried to explain the alien in non-alien terms. It proved impossible."

"I give up. I cannot argue with someone who casts aside the accepted rules of logic and invents ones of his own."

"One cannot analogize the non-existent."

"The reaction showed that the audience had never encountered this argument before or concocted anything like it of their own accord. None were stupid enough to accept it as serious assertion of fact. All were sufficiently intelligent to recognize it as logical or pseudo-logical denial of something self-evident and demonstrably true."

"“From what I have heard, from all that I have been told, I deduce a basic rule applying to lifeforms deemed intelligent.”… “And what is this rule?” “That the governing body of any lifeforms such as ours will be composed of power-lovers rather than of specialists.” “Well, isn’t it?” “Unfortunately, it is. Government falls into the hands of those who desire authority and escapes those with other interests.” He paused, went on. “That is not to say that those who govern us are stupid. They are quite clever in their own particular field of mass-organization. But by the same token they are pathetically ignorant of other fields.”"

"Power and scapegoats go together like husband and wife."

"She was of her own kind and it was a life form old in experience and remarkably astute. It had faced the inevitable a thousand times before and had learned the futility of battering against it head-on. It knew what to do with an immovable object: one climbs over it or burrows under it or sneaks around it. Once uses one’s brains because they are there to be used. Inevitability was not to be feared. That which cannot be stayed must be avoided with skill and ingenuity."

"By the standards of the dim past they were appallingly ugly; but by the standards of her especial planet and her especial era they were not ugly. They were merely an individualistic aspect of the same universal thing which is named Intelligence."

"Steve Ander sat and thought things over. It was his habit to think things over carefully. Astronauts were not the impulsive daredevils so dear to the stereopticon-loving public. They couldn’t afford to be. The hazards of the profession required an infinite capacity for cautious, contemplative thought. Five minutes’ consideration had prevented many a collapsed lung, many a leaky heart, many a fractured frame. Steve valued his skeleton. He wasn’t conceited about it and he’d no reason to believe it in any way superior to anyone else’s skeleton. But he’d had it a long time, found it quite satisfactory, and had an intense desire to keep it—intact."

"It pays to stop and think whenever you’ve got time to stop and think."

"The stuff was about twelve gauge and near enough for his purpose. It resembled deep-colored copper but was not as soft as copper nor as heavy. Hard, springy and light, like telephone wire. If there were at least a thousand yards of it below, and if he could manage to drag it up to the ship, and if the golden thing didn’t come along and ball up the works, he might be able to blow free. Then he’d get to some place civilized—if he could find it. The future was based on an appalling selection of “ifs.”"

"As for the causes, he listened to them with boredom. Only the strong know there is but one cause of war. All the other multitudinous reasons recorded in the history books were not real reasons at all. They were nothing but plausible pretexts. There was but one root-cause that persisted right back to the dim days of the jungle. When two monkeys want the same banana, that is war."

"The role of peacemaker appeals to those with any claim to be civilized."

"Yes or no? Yes meant military victory, power and fear. No meant—what? Well, no meant a display of reasonableness in lieu of stubbornness. No meant a considerable change of mind. It struck him suddenly that one must possess redoubtable force of character to throw away a long-nursed viewpoint and adopt a new one. It required moral courage. The weak and the faltering could never achieve it."

"No matter how irrational it may be, people often tend to dislike what they’re unable to understand."

"“No mob is composed of men, as such. It is made up of a few ringleaders and a horde of stupid followers.” He patted his guns. “You can always tell a ringleader—invariably he is the first to open his mouth!”"

"I insist on being considered. One dope is as good as another for making a mess of things."

"Things done the hard way aren’t necessarily done better. Nor are they done badly because done the easy way. The essence of progress consists of finding ways of avoiding old-time difficulties."

"On my world we’re old, incredibly old, and we’ve learned a lot from a past which is long and lurid. We’ve had empires by the dozens, though none as great as yours. They all went the same way—down the sinkhole. They all vanished for the same fundamental and inevitable reasons. Empires come and empires go, but little men go on forever."

"“I thought—” “Mr. McShane, I would advise to postpone thinking until you have accumulated sufficient facts to form a useful basis. That is the intelligent thing to do, is it not?”"

"“What do you say to that?” Giving a deep shrug, Taylor said, “That kind of political cynicism has been long out of date where I come from. I can’t help it if mentally you’re about ten millennia behind us.”"

"The curse of being an officer is that one is outranked by other officers."

"“Nuts to that! I consider myself a cut above these Kastans, having been conceived in holy wedlock.” “So do we all. But we must conceal the fact for as long as seems expedient. Good manners is the art of pretending that one is not superior.”"

"He made it either by sheer good luck or, more likely, happy absence of bad luck."

"Given brawn and brains and enough time there’s always a way in or out. Escapees shot down as they bolted had chosen the wrong time and wrong place, or the right time and wrong place, or the right place at the wrong time. Or they’d neglected brawn in favor of brains, a common fault of the impatient. Or they’d neglected brains in favor of brawn, a fault of the reckless."

"Whenever Man was unable to master his invoice with this bare hands, thought Leeming, the said environment got bullied or coerced into submission by Man plus X. That had been so from the beginning of time—Man plus a tool or a weapon. But X did not have to be anything concrete or solid, it did not have to be lethal or even visible. It could be a dream, an idea, an illusion, a bloody big thundering lie, just anything. There was only one true test—whether it worked."

"The stupid believe because they are credulous. The intelligent do not blindly accept but, when aware of their own ignorance, neither do they reject."

"“After all, somebody has to do the paperwork.” “I’d agree if the paperwork was necessary and made sense.” “If there wasn’t any paperwork, we’d both be out of a job.” “You've got something there. So on this planet there are two thousands of us sitting on our fundaments busily making work for each other.”"

"He thinks he’s heap big. To me he’s just a big heap."

"Put out the light and there is stumbling in the dark."

"“The World Council,” Railton snorted. “All they’re interested in is exploration, discovery and trade. All they can think of is culture and cash. They’re completely devoid of any sense of peril.” “Not being military officers,” Ashmore pointed out, “they can hardly be expected to exist in a state of perpetual apprehension.”"

"“Back at Terran H.Q.,” said Maxwell, “one is not shot at dawn for sabotage, treachery, assassination or any equally trifling misdeed. One is blindfolded and stood against the wall for not filling out forms, or for filling out the wrong ones, or for filling out the right ones with the wrong details.”"

"Superior life does not establish itself by benefit of brains alone; manual dexterity is equally essential."

"Obviously riled, he growled at Lawson, “The right to unobstructed passage covers our vessels as much as anyone else’s.” “It covers no warship bearing instructions to intercept, question, search or detain any other spaceship it considers suspicious,” declared the other. “Violators of the law are not entitled to claim protection of the law.” “Can you tell me how to conduct a war between systems without sending armed ships through space?” asked Markhamwit, bitterly sarcastic. Lawson waved an indifferent hand. “We aren’t the least bit interested in that problem. It is your own worry.” “It cannot be done,” Markhamwit shouted. “That’s most unfortunate,” remarked Lawson, full of false sympathy. “It creates an awful state of no-war.” “Are you trying to be funny?” “Is peace funny?” “War is a serious matter,” bawled Markhamwit, striving to retain a grip on his temper. “It cannot be ended with a mere flick of the finger.” “The fact should be borne in mind by those who so nonchalantly start them,” advised Lawson, quite unmoved by the Great Lord’s ire. “The Nileans started it.” “They say that you did.” “They are incorrigible liars.” “That’s their opinion of you, too.” A menacing expression on his face, Markhamwit said, “Do you believe them?” “We never believe opinions.” “You are evading my question. Somebody has to be a liar. Who do you think it is?” “We haven’t looked into the root-causes of your dispute. It is not our woe. So without any data to go upon we can only hazard a guess.” “Go ahead and do some hazarding then,” Markhamwit invited. He licked expectant lips. “Probably both sides have little regard for the truth,” opined Lawson, undeterred by the other’s attitude. “It is the usual setup. When war breaks out the unmitigated liar comes into his own. His heyday lasts for the duration. After that, the victorious liars hang the vanquished ones.”"

"Reasonableness is strength. Irrationality is weakness."

"Nobody knew better than the Solarians that wars are not caused , declared or willingly fought by nations, planetary peoples or shape-groups, for these consist in the main of plain, ordinary folk who crave nothing more than to be left alone. The real culprits are power-drunken cliques of near-maniacs who by dint of one means or another have coerced the rest."

"Inside their military minds conditioning masqueraded as logic."

"“Do you suppose that this other-life might be…might be…like us?” “I see no reason why not,” declared Bvandt, after some thought. “We are by far the highest form in the known cosmos, therefore any other high form must be similar.” “The logic of that is not evident.”"

"Markham was going to hand him a tough one. That was Markham’s job: to rake through a mess of laconic, garbled, distorted or eccentric reports, pick out the obvious problems and dump them squarely in the laps of whoever happened to be hanging around and was considered suitable to solve them. One thing could be said in favor of this technique: its victims often were bothered, bedeviled or busted, but at least they were never bored. The problems were not commonplace, the solutions sometimes fantastic."

"The first rule of captaincy is to consider the men before considering an exterior problem. There is no real solution to any predicament unless there is also the means to apply it."

"After this, doors had to be opened with all the caution of a tax collector coping with a mysterious parcel that ticks."

"If there’s one lesson we’ve learned in the cosmos it’s that of never despising an alien culture. A species too big to learn soon goes small."

"We first dug out sixteen thousand fluent speakers of the several Sirian dialects. Eliminating the females and children brought the number down to nine thousand. Then, step by step, we cut out the elderly, the infirm, the weak, the untrustworthy, the temperamentally unsuitable. We weeded out those too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too stupid, too rash, too cautious, and so forth. We weren't left with many among whom to seek for wasps."

"Listen to me. You were born in Masham, capital city of Diracta – the Sirian home planet. Your father was a trader there at the time. You lived on Diracta until the age of seventeen, when you returned with your parents to Terra."

"That was the kind of chance that must be taken when one holes up in known and regularly checked haunts. The risk was not enormous, in fact it was small – but it was still there. And when tried, sentenced and waiting for death it is no consolation to know that what came off was a hundred to one chance. To keep going and to maintain the one-man battle the enemy had to be outwitted, if possible, all along the line and all the time."

"When one is fighting a paper-war one uses paper-war tactics that in the long run can be just as lethal as high explosive. And the tactics are not limited in scope by use of one material. The said material is very variable in form. Paper can convey a private warning, a public threat, secret temptation, open defiance; wall-bills, window-stickers, leaflets dropped by the thousands from the roof-tops, cards left on seats or slipped into pockets and purses... money."

"Science fiction, like any other genuine literary form, must evolve. It was easier in the old days — easier to find ideas, easier to stop in the middle of everything for a dissertation on Jupiter's moons. The modern way, starting a story in the middle of a future- or other-world environment and taking it from there is a challenge to the writer. It isn't always easy, but it is fun."

"I can remember depending on people like Eric Frank Russell and J. T. Macintosh to give me a good, comfortable read, to tell me a story. Whether they told me anything I didn't know or hadn't thought about or read someplace else was another matter."

"Fate sits on these dark battlements and frowns, And as the portal opens to receive me, A voice in hollow murmurs through the courts Tells of a nameless deed."

"But hark! what shriek of death comes in the gale, And in the distant ray what glimmering sail Bends to the storm?—Now sinks the note of fear! Ah? wretched mariners!—no more shall day Unclose his cheering eye to light ye on your way!"

"One thing that happens with gothic novels is the idea of the evil Other. That’s quite clear if you read Walpole or Radcliffe. It’s often an evil Italian or an evil Spaniard. Catholicism is mixed with that. It’s like these exotic evil Catholic people that are coming to pervert us."

"All these things were slipping away from him, in a clear, cold wisdom that came from beyond the stars. He envisioned man as a bit of animate clay moving fro a little while upon a ball of mud and stone and water that drifted through the void, through the darkness that would finally engulf it."

"When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build."

"We are all part of some cosmic pattern, and this pattern works toward good and not evil. It builds and does not destroy. So I shall go on in my search for a race where I can find kinship and happiness."

"A casual eye might have seen nothing extraordinary in Wade as he moved lithely across the meadow toward the Thunderbug. He was tall, lean and rangy, looking rather like a college boy on a vacation, with his brown, almost youthful face and tousled dark hair, so deep-black that it was almost blue. A closer inspection would have shown more significant details. There was an iron hardness underlying Wade’s face, like iron beneath velvet. His jet eyes were decidedly not those of a boy. There was a curious quality of soft depth to them, although sometimes that black deep could freeze over with deadly purpose."

"“Counsel will continue,” said the judge, wishing he were Jeffreys so he could send the whole damned bunch to the scaffold. Jurisprudence should be founded on justice, and not be a three-dimensional chess game. But, of course, it was the natural development of the complicated political and economic factors of modern civilization."

"The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed. Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life...."

"We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here."

"In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a dagger's blow or a strangler's hands."

"Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. "For," he thought, "a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtar's hand saved me, one never knows." Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so."

"Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came — but from whence I do not know — and civilizations arose. … These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas. . . ."

"They dare'd not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. … This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn't pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room" — Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors — "in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough — more than enough — to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon's breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis."

"The stars glittered frostily overhead, unconcerned with the fate of Atlantis — stars that would be shining thousands of years hence when Atlantis was not even a memory."

"Beauty is almost wholly a matter of fashion; what is beautiful today would have been grotesque a couple of generations ago and will be grotesque a hundred years ahead. It will be worse than grotesque; it will be outmoded and therefore faintly ridiculous."

"I could be as jittery as you if I wanted to. But I've studied history and literature. And architecture, and a lot of things. Just to balance this psycho work. There’s a lot more perfection in a Doric column than in you."

"If a scientifically trained observer sees a gun go off for the first time, he should be able—theoretically, anyway—to work out a formula for gunpowder."

"He did not even try, for fear of succeeding. What could he say? “Disarm. Seek peace. Hammer your swords into ploughshares.” And suppose they did? The enemy would strike again—and succeed, against an unprepared nation."

"In Eden the trouble began. And even after that, Cain slew Abel. In every Paradise, there have been wars. But in the Polar cold, in the Sahara, in all inhospitable lands where men wrench a dangerous living from the hostile elements, there is comradeship in unity against the Enemy older than man, the universe in which he dwells."

"“Oddly enough—” And here the devil sighed. “Oddly enough, those who make bargains with me never do have the capability to use their gifts. I suppose only inferior minds expect to get something for nothing. Yours is distinctly inferior.”"

"The words. I couldn’t understand the words. The only means of communication, and they are a deadly barrier."

"We grew up in a commercial world and how can we tell what’s real, now?"

"Then I knew that the last test of sanity had failed me, for it was no longer possible to tell the unreal from the real. The last test fails when the illusion moves into life itself and you can touch and feel and handle the commercial vision as if she were the real woman. There was no defense any more."

"Love is a false synonym for propagation, as the soul is a wish fulfillment creation growing out of self-preservation."

"Man has the hardest job of all, the job of making decisions on incomplete data."

"The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other."

"The two girls looked at one another, caught in the terrible, helpless problem of immaturity, the knowledge that the mores of the adult world are too complicated to understand, and that children must walk warily. Adults are always right. They are an alien race."

"And adults will recognize a mirage; a child will be deceived. But conversely, an intellectual mirage will deceive an adult, not a child."

"She was suffering the first pains of maturity’s burden, the knowledge of responsibility misused."

"It was rather difficult to think of a duel seriously, even though everyone else did, when the details of the barbecue dinner were prosaic in his mind. So it went. The tides of civilization rolled in century-long waves across the continents, and each particular wave, though conscious of its participation in the tide, nevertheless was more preoccupied with dinner."

"The man had a bad temper, and if people kicked him around, he asked for it by starting the kicking himself."

"The social problems were far tougher than technological ones, because the human basics remained unaltered, and people don’t change as fast as things."

"People don’t change, they just grow older. But fads and gadgets and trivia alter fast, even to the point of becoming unrecognizable."

"Harding was elected because he promised normalcy. After war, men were tired. They wanted to crawl back into a 1912 womb. They didn’t want experiments that might upset their lives further."

"People seem to like new things—if they weren’t too new, if they didn’t seem to point the way to Change."

"“Forbid them to sing it.” But the minister’s voice was dubious. “Ja, but can they be forbidden to think it? They always think of what is verboten. They can’t help it. It’s a basic human instinct.”"

"The whole thing never happened and I can prove it — now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story. So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space."

"I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever — forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space — on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end. From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis."

"I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor. And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Ea — which I shall never be able to describe fully. I saw it, though. I saw it..."

"For me, the Big Ride. You start when you’re born. You climb on the toboggan and then you’re off. But you can only have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-taker you want to go again. They shovel you under at the end of the slope and there’s a new lot of passengers waiting. You’ve had your three-score and ten. And it’s over."

"He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius."

"I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features. "Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?" "A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny — and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand.""

"The race moves on. It has its human limitations. The tools we make have no limitations at all. When we educate ourselves to learn to handle those tools most efficiently we can go on to the next step, whatever it may be. Meanwhile there must be check and balance—rigid control."

"This isn't my world, now. Not any more. Not the world I left. This is a world in which no nekronic flash leaped from a box that Ira De Kalb opened and dropped to his hearthstone to infect the world, De Kalb and me. All that did happen once, in another world that hasn't existed since the four of us, a doubled weapon wielded by the Face of Ea, wrought the cleaving apart of two universes. Imponderable forces shifted when that cleavage took place. You and I know nothing about it, for it happened far beyond the perceptions of any sentient creature. But it happened. Oh yes, it happened."

"I'm going forward. I know — because I went. It was a wonderful world they had. I want to see more of it. I want to wake up in a time when the race of man is spreading through the galaxy, leaping across the gulfs between the stars, opening the gates to all the worlds. I want to and I will."

"Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me..."

"I believe in things I never used to. I think someone is trying to find me — has found me. And is calling. Who it is I don't know. What they want I don't know. But a little while ago I found out one more thing — this sword." I picked the sword up from the table. "It isn't what I want," I went on, "But sometimes, when my mind is — abstract, something from outside floats into it. Like the need for a sword. And not any sword — just one. I don't know what the sword looks like, but I'd know if I held it in my hand." I laughed a little. "And if I drew it a few inches from the sheath, I could put out that fire up there as if I'd blown on it like a candleflame. And if I drew the sword all the way out — the world would come to an end!"

"There is a sword," I said. "A sword that is — is not quite a sword as we think of weapons. My mind is cloudy there still. But I know that Ghast Rhymi can tell me where it is. A weapon, yet not a weapon. The Sword Called Llyr."

"Her hands came out of her sleeves. There was a rod of blinding silver in each. Before I could stir she had brought the rods together, crossing them before her smiling face. At the intersection forces of tremendous power blazed into an instant's being, forces that streamed from the poles of the world and could touch only for the beat of a second if that world were not to be shaken into fragments. I felt the building reel below me. I felt the gateway open."

"It seeks but will not be sought. It finds but will not be found. It holds the one who would touch, Who would cut away pain and ill. But its blade cuts two ways and will not be turned. If you value your well-being, Impede not its way. Treat the toucher doubly well, For he bears the weight Of the balance that must be struck."

"If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?"

"I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times."

"The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents."

"It’s not that I don’t have convictions, or that I won’t defend them. I save my battles for things that have meaning instead of tilting at every mild irritation that comes my way. You can fritter away your whole life with those kinds of windmills."

"Jilly always says the family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into; that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics."

"Humanity’s whole unfortunate history is one long account of how we attack what we don’t understand, what’s strange to us."

"See, when you get down to the basics of it, everything’s just molecules vibrating. Which is what music is, what sound is—vibrations in the air. So we’re all part of that music and the worthier it is, the more voices we can add to it, the better off we all are."

"I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not something I’ll let happen to me again."

"“He can be so sweet on one page, and then on the next he’s taking you on a tour through an abattoir.” “Just like life,” Bramley said."

"Blasting out of the stores speakers was the new Beastie Boys album. It sounded like a cross between heavy metal and bad rap and was about as appealing as being hit by a car. You couldn’t deny its energy, though."

"“Don’t you ever watch TV?” Jilly shook her head. “What? And let the aliens monitor my brain waves?”"

"The best kinds of practical jokes are those that backfire on whoever’s playing the trick."

"The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it."

"“I’d rather stare at a brick wall, any time, than watch that damn TV in the lounge,” he’d told Jilly more than once. “That’s when things started to go wrong—with the invention of television. Wasn’t till then that we found out there was so much wrong in the world.”"

"Jilly was one of those who preferred to know what was going on and try to do something about it, rather than pretend it wasn’t happening and hoping that, by ignoring what was wrong, it would just go away. Truth was, Jilly had long ago learned, trouble never went away. It just got worse—unless you fixed it."

"But music has its own enchantment and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the old Firehall’s basement."

"In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express; only the drum was older."

"That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."

"“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. “The others are just words on a page.”"

"“Who is he?” she asked. “Or maybe I should be asking what is he?” “I’ve always thought of him as a kind of anima, Jilly said. “A loose bit of myth that got left behind when all the others went on to wherever it is that myths go when we don’t believe in them anymore.”"

"It’s so much easier for most people to relate to a TV set than it is to another person. They get all this data fed into them, but they don’t know what to do with it anymore. When they talk to other people, it’s all surface. How ya doing, what about the weather. The only opinions they have are those that they’ve gotten from people on the TV. They think they’re informed, but all they’re doing is repeating the views of talk show hosts and news commentators."

"They’d met three years ago at a record launch party when Hilary had made a pass at her. Once they got past the fact that Zoe preferred men and wasn’t planning on changing that preference, they discovered that they had far too much in common not to be good friends."

"Creeps don’t need reasons for what they do; that’s why they’re creeps."

"Do you know what fear stands for? Fuck Everything And Run."

"She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical. Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real."

"I find that a lot of people have this thing about making crap romantic, the way they like to blur outlaws and heroes, the good with the bad."

"I know that feeling all too well, but I broke the only pair of rose-colored glasses I had the chance to own a long time ago."

"Every big city like this is really two worlds. You could say it’s divided up between the haves and the have-nots, but it’s not that simple. It’s more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like me belongs to the night. Not because I’m bad, but because I’m invisible. People don’t know I exist."

"It was the old story, he realized. Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt."

"Look, I’m sorry if I don’t measure up to how people want me to be, but this is just the way I am."

"Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life."

"Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened."

"Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn’t reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it."

"It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that’s more important than the actual answer. It’s good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there’s more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun."

"She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name."

"As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary."

"There are three kinds of kids: the ones that are the odd birds, the ones that pissed on them, and the ones that watched it happen."

"“Often,” he says, “what we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.”"

"The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel."

"Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn."

"What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer."

"There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back."

"I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn’t he deal with some real problems? Why didn’t he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him — if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, “God’s will.” And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good. When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn’t, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn’t believe his battles with criminals, superpowered geniuses and the like. I never believed in God either."

"Our time’s the most precious thing we’ve got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us."

"That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her."

"When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different."

"You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn’t change the fact that some things are real and some things aren’t. There’s a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy."

"A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since."

"Only fools think they’re wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can."

"“You’re confusing me.” “But not deliberately so,” Coyote says. “Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.”"

"You’re not a nun, are you? You haven’t taken one of those absurd vows that cut you off from what otherwise might be a full and healthy human existence?"

"“The thing is,” Coyote says, “nothing’s as easy as we’d like it to be.” “Don’t I know it,” I mutter, but he’s not even listening to me. “And the real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.”"

"Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"

"“Compromise is necessary,” Max agreed, “so long as you never give up who you are. That isn’t compromise; that’s spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.”"

"The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary."

"By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged."

"Life’s like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning."

"If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are."

"Nothing’s different, but everything has changed."