Novelists From The United States

"One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite."

"“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”"

"“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”"

"“Do you like Denver?” “Sure,” I said. I found the pocket-sized recorder and laid it on the table. “Smog, oil refineries, traffic. What’s not to like?”"

"“Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence.”"

"Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?"

"He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket."

"A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key."

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

"It took two thousand years for man to move from the concept that amber was a stone with a soul to the concept of static electricity."

"Water does not care whether you bathe in it or drown in it. The mountains do not care whether you climb them or go around them. The stars do not care whether man reaches them or not. The universe does not care whether man masters all the relationships of its forces and processes, or dies because he refuses to master them. Life continues as it uses those relationships to further its growth. It ceases when it becomes overcome by still other forces which it cannot master."

"Truth frightens man. He plants illusion in the debris of his mind to hide him from the clean white light she brings. His arguments defeat her wisdom. In his preconceptions and prejudices he dictates, in advance, what form she must take, what garments she must wear; and because of this he often does not recognize her when they meet. His illusion drives her from him. And yet he still yearns and seeks for truth."

"“There’s only one way to guard a secret so effectively that no one can misuse it to his own advantage and the detriment of others,” Kennedy mused slowly, “And that’s to give it away—make it open knowledge. Give it to everybody.” “Scientists have known that for a long time,” Hoskins said, “That’s why we keep insisting on free trade of ideas.”"

"It’s pretty human to smash the guy or the thing which tries to tell us something we don’t want to hear."

"He quickly lowered his eyes to his knees again, to conceal the pain in them, to conceal his broken faith in the innate goodness of men, the profound despair of realization that reason might not after all triumph over ignorance. “Perhaps,” he murmured aloud, “To believe in the inevitable triumph of rationality might, in itself, be no more than another expression of those same superstitions which we deplore in the ignorant. It is apparently an occupational disease, perhaps a fatal one, for the scientist to be too sanguine about eventual rule by reason. There is so little evidence...”"

"Somehow I got the impression that instead of looking into a crystal ball, they would be more inclined to look out of one."

"There are two basic approaches to the meaning of life and the universe about us. Man can know: That is the approach of science, its whole meaning. There are mysteries which man was not meant to know: That is the other approach. There is no reconciling of the two on a reasoning basis."

"At this stage of man’s evolution, our scientists have been like little children facing a table piled high with the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. One piece is picked up and its holder says, “This is the important piece. I hold the one key to everything in my hands.” Well, of course, he does. Because every piece is a key piece."

"People will tie in with a fanatic if for no other reason than to break the monotony of their lives."

"Everyone recognized that only five percent of all the people born ever amount to anything at all. Everyone humbly thanked his providential stars that through his own personal efforts and merit he had become one of the superior five percent. Everyone looked with pity and contempt upon the ninety-five percent who did not share his grace."

"Instant acceptance of an idea is as self-defeating as instant rejection."

"That kind of therapy, the use of force to make a man give up his convictions, has been tried since the dawn of history. I think we should have learned by now that it won’t work."

"He was not psychotic enough to set himself up as a chosen arbiter of mores and laws."

"To say that man has already achieved the ultimate and absolute truth is like a tribal taboo which says that a given river may never be crossed because the witch doctor proves beyond all reason that there is only chaos beyond. The most puzzling of all contradictory concepts given me is the human will to set up such arbitrary limits to his comprehension."

"Think back through all the eras of history—the major ones, the tiny obscure ones known only to scholars. Can you think of a man, ever, who was capable of fashioning the future development of mankind to suit his own idea of it—no matter how noble that ideal may have been? Wouldn’t that be just another form of opinion control—no matter how splendid the conception?” Kennedy did not turn around. “It takes a great deal of faith in mankind to keep from directing it the way we think it should go,” he said at last."

"In either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law, but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose."

"The public wants miracles. The public demands miracles; and if one source ceases to provide them, they will turn to another source which seems to accomplish the spectacular. Even while they resented and opposed the scientific attitude, they lapped up the miracles which this attitude accomplished with glee."

"A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has the more willing he is to give a firm opinion; and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts."

"The universe does not care whether man unlocks its secrets or leaves them closed. Water does not care whether man bathes in it or drowns in it; whether it waters his fields or washes them away. If man masters its laws and utilizes his knowledge, water becomes a force in his favor. But enemy or servant, water does not care."

"Early in his career Hoskins had realized that no field of science is remote from the affairs of men, that there is a sociological implication inherent even in the simple set of screwing a nut on a bolt."

"There had been many times when man had been forced to adopt the only right opinion. Each time man’s forward thrust had slackened, vegetated, and died. Once, through the dark ages, the period had lasted almost a thousand years."

"It (objection to a machine that could think) was the hook used by the rabble rousers, whose monopoly of moral interpretation might be challenged."

"Logical rationality is neither subversive nor nonsubversive. It is simply a statement of fact."

"The suppressed hunger to think was like an epidemic."

"He's a two-faced, cutthroat, dirt-dumb, chickenshit, slimy little bastard... with a bright future in politics."

"Very few laws remain the same. Once enacted, they are likely to be studied, modified, amended, then often repealed altogether. This constant tinkering by judges and lawmakers is usually a good thing. Bad laws are weeded out. Weak laws are improved. Good laws are fine tuned."

"My name became a brand, and I'd love to say that was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books."

"I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths."

"Every human being is unique. We can generalize at length, but every human being is an individual. And this is especially true about children -- every child develops in their own unique way."

"Life must be a daring adventure or it is nothing at all. It's always a choice between joy and despair. I tried despair. Joy is more fun."

"The second time is by mutual consent."

"There are only two times when it's appropriate for a man to have his nose in a woman's vagina. The first time is when he's stark naked and weighs about 7 lbs."

"Love isn't what you get. It's what you create."

"I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss."

"You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for. Live well, my son."

"Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape."

"I wish I could change it all. I wish I could. But I can’t. Dammit. Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful."

"I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think."

"You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference."

"Life is full of little surprises. Time travel is full of big ones."