Novelists From The United States

"“Why do you fight this war?” The alien mind howled out its war slogan—as incomprehensible as an astrologer’s jargon."

"Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living."

"“All right. Let’s begin with the world situation.” “I’d prefer a more cheerful subject—like cancer.”"

"I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry."

"There’s nothing like a little slavery to make a man appreciate even a modest portion of freedom."

"The human mind is a pattern, nothing more. The first dim flicker of awareness in the evolving forebrain of Australopithecus carried that pattern in embryo; and down through all the ages, as the human neural engine increased in power and complexity, gained control of its environment in geometrically expanding increments, the pattern never varied. Man clings to his self-orientation as the psychological center of the Universe. He can face any challenge within that framework, suffer any loss, endure any hardship—so long as the structure remains intact. Without it he’s a mind adrift in a trackless infinity—lacking any scale against which to measure his aspirations, his losses, his victories. Even when the light of his intellect shows him that the structure is itself a product of his brain; that infinity knows no scale, and eternity no duration—still he clings to his self-non-self concept, as a philosopher clings to a life he knows must end, to ideals he knows are ephemeral, to causes he knows will be forgotten."

"An idea was beginning to get through, and he wasn’t liking it very well."

"“It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all ‘established facts.’”"

"I know; you don’t consider it impossible. That’s the trouble with you; you don’t consider anything impossible. It would make life a lot easier for me if you’d let me rule out a few items—like leprechauns who hang out at Stonehenge."

"I’m arguing with myself and I can’t tell who’s winning."

"Foster shook his head. “The inherent inertia of the human mind,” he said. “How it fights to resist new ideas.”"

"To be adult is to be disillusioned. Only realities count."

"Most taboos have to do with eating, sex, elimination or gods; so remember, look before you sit down, lie down, squat down or kneel down!"

"So—let’s remember the Uranium Rule. Don’t Do It! The Other Guy May Be Bigger!"

"Are you sure you’re really the Devil and not someone else with the same name?"

"Lucifer hurried on. “But I assure you that most of what you’ve heard is grossly exaggerated. That is to say, I’m not really as bad as all that. I mean, there are different kinds of er, badness. There is the real evil, and then there’s sin. I’m, ah, associated with sin.” “The distinction seems a subtle one, Mr., ah, Lucifer—” “Not really, professor. We all sense instinctively what true evil is. Sin is merely statutory evil—things that are regarded as wrong simply because there’s a rule against them. Like, ah, smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor and going to movies on Sunday, or wearing lipstick and silk hose, or eating pork, or swatting flies—depending on which set of rules you’re going by. They’re corollary to ritual virtues such as lighting candles or spinning prayer wheels or wearing out-of-date styles.” Dimpleby leaned back and steepled his fingers. “Hmmm. Whereas genuine evil…?” “Murder, violence, lying, cheating, theft,” Lucifer enumerated. “Sin, on the other hand, essentially includes anything that looks like it might be fun.” “Come to think of it, I’ve never heard anything in praise of fun from the anti-sin people,” Curl said thoughtfully. “Nor from any ecclesiastic with a good head for fund-raising,” Dimpleby concluded. “It’s all due to human laziness, I’m afraid,” Lucifer said sadly. “It seems so much easier and more convenient to observe a few ritual prohibitions than to actually give up normal business practices.”"

"Man clings to his self-orientation at the psychological center of the Universe. You can face any challenge within that framework, suffer any loss, endure any hardship—so long as the structure remains intact."

"The Third Era had recognized the impossibility of correcting the effects of human interference with more human interference."

"“I can see there’s been a miscarriage of justice.” “An abortion, you mean!"

"“The San Andreas Fault,” Waverly groaned. “Good-by San Francisco!” “It’s the Sequoias I’m thinking of,” Fom Berj sighed. “Remarkable organisms, and not nearly so easy to replace as San Franciscans.”"

"“You’re talking to yourself.” “It’s all right. I’m not listening.” (p. 78)"

"The last burst picked me up and threw me a thousand miles into an open grave and the mud showered down on me and a giant tombstone fell out of the sky to mark the place, but I didn’t care any more, because I was far away, in that place where the heroes and the cowards lie together with a fine impartiality, waiting for eternity to pass, slowly, like a procession of snails creeping across an endless desert toward a distant line of mountains. (p. 18)"

"Adventure has been defined as somebody else having a difficult time, a long way away. (p. 17)"

"I was still alive, but that was a mere detail, subject to change. (p. 13)"

"Her life, except for reading, had been dull—but it had not been in vain."

"Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war."

"The cat didn’t answer, except possibly by not answering."

"“Are you interested in science?” “Of course I am. Who isn’t?”"

"I want men who, like you, would not take orders even if I should give them. I do not want to be a god, Crag, even though I have some powers beyond mankind’s; I would not let my new world be colonized by people who might even be tempted to obey me."

"It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees."

"Still sitting there, still looking up in the tree. At something that isn’t there? Luke wondered. Or at something that isn’t there for me but is there for him, and which of us is right? And he thinks that I don’t exist and I think I do, and which of us is right about that? Well, I am, on that point if no other. I think, therefore I am. But how do I know he’s there? Why couldn’t he be a figment of my imagination? Silly solipsism, the type of wondering just about everybody goes through sometime during adolescence, and then recovers from. But it gives to wonder all over again when you and other people start seeing things differently or start seeing different things."

"A new racket, probably. A depression breeds rackets as a swamp breeds mosquitoes."

"“Nuts,” said the Martian. “You people got rocks in your heads, that’s what accounts for your superstitions.”"

"I thought of the distant future and the things we’d have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X.R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matter-energy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We’re Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You’ll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they’ll do and what they’ll be. The stars? Hell, yes. They’ll have the stars."

"Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy."

"I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him."

"I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind."

"Bad, I thought, looking around me, that I’d accumulated so much. A man should never own more stuff than he can carry in his hands at a dead run. It was bad, but it had happened."

"“But do you believe they really teleported?” “I do. For instance, the guru with whom I spent time, under whom I studied this summer in Tibet, tells me he is certain that he has teleported twice. He is an honest man.” “Let’s grant that. Tell me why you think he isn’t a mistaken one.”"

"A lot of my childhood playmates ended up behind bars and I don’t mean as bartenders."

"I wished that I could pray. Then I did pray, “God, I don’t believe that you exist, and I believe that if you do exist you’re an impersonal entity and that if you notice the fall of sparrows you don’t do anything about it, on request or otherwise, but if I’m wrong, I’m sorry. And in case I’m wrong I pray to you that...”"

"I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even though I won’t know about it while it’s happening. Since I’m a public figure I suppose there’ll have to be one, but I don’t want the only person I really love there sharing in it. If I die, I don’t want you to see me dead, even the outside of a coffin. I want your last memory of me to be as I am now, alive. I don’t want you even to think about a funeral or send flowers. Will you promise me those things, Max? “Yes, if you’ll quit talking about them.”"

"Living creatures, sea gulls, soaring lazily and gracefully overhead. Living creatures, a group of girls, walking by, giggling and jiggling. The lazy rhythm of the waves, the sun’s warmth and the sky’s blueness. I waved my arm at it. “All this, M’bassi. All this and the stars too. Isn’t it enough without having to invent a religion and a God?”"

"It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length mirrors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old."

"The ever-present possibility of making a big mistake worried him. He’d have worried about it more if he’d known that he already had."

"He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And laziness is curable."

"Well, let’s call his age as pushing sixty and not mention from which direction he was pushing it."

"In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change—and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water."

"It said, “Ask, what is man?” Mechanically, he asked it. “Man is a blind alley in evolution, who came too late to compete, who has always been controlled and played with by The Brightly Shining, which was old and wise before man walked erect. “Man is a parasite upon a planet populated before he came, populated by a Being that is one and many, a billion cells but a single mind, a single intelligence, a single will—as is true of every other populated planet in the universe. “Man is a joke, a clown, a parasite. He is nothing; he will be less.”"

"Paranoia is a form of insanity which, Dr. Randoph told me, hasn’t any physical symptoms. It’s just a delusion supported by a systematic framework of rationalization. A paranoiac can be sane in every way except one."