Journalists From England

"I was thinking of going into the assassination business. You know what a dreamer I am. Would it be too much of a hit and myth operation, do you think?"

"“There’s more to life than drugs and sex, Mr. Cornelius.” “There’s more than life to drugs and sex. It’s better than nothing.”"

"Yesterday’s underdog is tomorrow’s tyrant."

"Even ruin could not make it picturesque. The streets were awash with weather-stained postcards, bedraggled and muddy King Arthur tea-towels, broken plastic Holy Grails, Excaliburs carved from chalk, tiny Round Tables to hang on the wall, and polystyrene crowns. In the reign of one Elizabeth the ideal had reached perfection and, in the reign of another, it had achieved its ultimate degradation."

"If you were to believe all the old, degenerate German legends, there’s a Grail in every castle, a Charlemagne or an Arthur under every mound! There not a noble house without at least one werewolf offspring or a younger son who’s made a pact with the Devil, an uncle practising the profane arts of alchemy, a vampirical grandfather, a mad monk, a ruined abbey in the grounds where witches meet, an incarcerated lunatic (or heiress—or both), an infanticide or two (and a patricide), and, of course, a family ghost."

"I had learned, after all, to trust neither religion nor politics and to put my faith in the realities of metal, wood and steam, in practical engineering, whose rules could neither be changed nor made the subject of morality, so why should I show reverence for mere antiquity?"

"The English, I now know, eat mashed fish and deviled sheep’s hearts to guarantee a bad digestion (and consequent irritability). It is their abominable cooking which has given them half the world as their Empire."

"“It’s never ‘should’ with engineers, my old friend, but ‘how’? Have you not learned that much?”"

"His stated principle is that all knowledge should be at the public disposal. He argues against the hoarding of scientific discoveries, believing that the miserly act of secretion is in itself bound to produce fear and unnecessary caution in the mind of the citizen. Superstitious destruction of the unfamiliar is its most common expression. Prince Badehoff-Fischer argues that in such matters a secret is parallel, if not identical, to a lie. Both occur because one body seeks power over another."

"An unquestioned creed is a noose about the throat of Reason."

"I had sampled several such brotherhoods, including the Rosey Cross and the Orange Lodge, during the period in which I examined the Supernatural and found it not merely uninstructive but damnably dull, its members possessing nothing in the way of individual imagination and a great need to seek confirmation in numbers for the merits of miserable little madnesses....Such people as a rule were lonely, confounded misfits, attempting to alter the surrounding evidence of Nature by inventing abstractions to explain why common facts were false and ordinary reality a poor illusion."

"“He’s vain. His vanity’s hurt by the world’s refusal to accept his remedies and become immediately Enlightened. And what does a vain man do when insulted, Sir?”...“He lashes out, Sir,” says I. “He seeks to portion blame. He fumes, Sir. He attacks. In the case before us, such is his despotic power, he kills. He kills, Sir. He wars on other nations. Mary’s blood, Sir, but this poor sphere of ours suffers more from the single, frustrated egoist than from any natural—or supernatural—misery. Your own Church’s history, Sir, illustrates my point well enough, eh? We are too frequently in the power of mad children, who rage and stamp and break Kingdoms as they break toys. They order thousands of deaths a day as if they were spoiled brats kicking at their dolls!”"

"This vast pile of natural beauty, those crags and fir trees and hovering hawks, those echoing ravines and vast tumblings of snow and earth, brought me swiftly to the understanding of my own insignificance and, indeed, the insignificance of all human struggle."

"Once rich, moreover, I should again travel easily about Europe, for while in the public eye a poor radical is dangerous rogue, a rich radical is merely an eccentric gentleman!"

"But now the Mob’s passing whim had become the only law, as Robespierre himself would soon discover. I felt cruelly betrayed: by the Revolution, by men I had embraced as brothers, by Circumstance, and, as always, by God."

"I pray, in short, that God exists, that Lucifer brings about His own Redemption and that mankind therefore shall in time be free of them both forever: for until Man makes his own justice according to his own experience, he will never know what true peace can be."

"“Are you still afraid?” I asked her. “No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural and the monstrous. I shall be happy enough to smell the pines and hear the song of the thrush. And to be with you, Captain von Bek.” “The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer. I held her hand tightly."

"“So you are still our Master,” said Sabrina. She was frowning. She had come to be afraid again. “Not so!” Lucifer turned, almost in rage. “You are your own masters. Your destiny is yours. Your lives are your own. Do you not see that this means an end to the miraculous? You are at the beginning of a new age for Man, an age of investigation and analysis.” “The Age of Lucifer,” I said, echoing some of His own irony. He saw the joke in it. He smiled. “Man, whether he be Christian or pagan, must lean to rule himself, to understand himself, to take responsibility for himself. There can be no Armageddon now. If Man is destroyed, he shall have destroyed himself.” “So we are to live without aid,” said Sabrina. Her face was clearing. “And without hindrance,” said Lucifer. “It will be your fellows, your children and their children who will find the Cure for the World’s Pain.” “Or perish in the attempt,” said I. “It is a fair risk,” said Lucifer. “And you must remember, von Bek, that it is in my interest that you succeed. I have wisdom and knowledge at your disposal. I always had that gift for Man. And now that I may give it freely I choose not to do so. Each fragment of wisdom shall be earned. And it shall be hard-earned, captain.”"

"Can Hell and Heaven be merely the difference between ignorance and knowledge?"

"“The marvelous is of necessity a lie, a distortion. At best it is a metaphor which leads to the truth. I think that I know what causes the World’s Pain, lady. Or at least I think I know what contributes to that Pain.” “And what would that be, Ulrich von Bek?” “By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World’s Pain. And pain, lady, creates pain. And one must not seek to become saint or sinner, God or Devil. One must seek to become human and to love the fact of one’s humanity.” I became embarrassed. “That is all I have learned, lady.” “It is all that Heaven demands,” she said."

"When he was dead I raised myself to my feet and I looked about me. Everything was still. A loneliness had come upon my soul. There was darkness everywhere now but in the forest. And even here there were wisps of grey, as if evil crept in. I lifted my head to the sky and I shook my fist. “Oh, I reject you. I reject your Heaven and I reject your Hell. Do as you wish with me, but know that your desires are petty and your ambitions have no meaning!” I addressed no one. I addressed the universe. I addressed a void."

"“Despair leads to many forms of thought,” said the magus, “and many kinds of action. Despair drives some to greater sanity, towards an analysis of the world as it is and what it might be. Others it drives to deep and dangerous insanity, towards an imposition of their own desires upon reality. I sympathize with your despair, Johannes Klosterheim, because it has no solace, in the end. Your despair is the worst there is to know. And yet men often look upon the likes of you and envy you, as you doubtless envy Duke Arioch, as Duke Arioch doubtless envies his master Lucifer, whom he would betray, and perhaps as Lucifer envied God. And what does God envy, I wonder? Perhaps he envies the simple mortal who is content with his lot and envies nobody.”"

"“I shall know soon.” I hesitated. “I shall know if all these adventurings, all these ordeals, have been meaningless or not. Man struggles in the belief that he can, by dint of perseverance, affect his own destiny. And all those efforts, I think, lead to nothing but ruin."

"Man is a rationalizing beast, if not a rational one."

"“What more could you need?” I smiled in self-mockery. “Reassurance, I suppose.” “That must come from your own judgment, from your own testing of your conscience. It is the only kind of reassurance worth having, as I’m sure you would agree.”"

"Do not speculate, Sedenko, on things for which no evidence exists. You will waste your time."

"Again that smile of exquisite and self-congratulatory piety."

"I watched him while he moved about in the nearby spinney below, bending and straightening, shaking snow from the sticks he found, and for some reason was reminded of the parable of Abraham and his son. Why should one serve a God who demanded such insane loyalty, who demanded that one deny the very humanity He was said to have created?"

"There were three known existing sapphires. One was in the Conquest of Space Museum on Terra, one was in the hands of United System President Polonius Delph—he was the richest man in seven worlds, or had been until he’d paid cash for his jewel. The other had been stolen soon after its discovery. Maybe Delph had it... “From what I understand of your world, Delph isn’t the only one who wants the sapphires. He has rivals in the Plutocracy. Another mysterious collector? Or those rivals are competing for the presidency or they think they can ruin him. As you know, it’s a vicious circle in politics. You can’t get to be president unless you have the wealth and you can’t really make massive sums until you’re president.”"

"The society was the nearest thing to perfection that had ever existed; vital without being violent, stable without being stagnant. This society had resulted from a number of factors, the most important being a small population served by a sophisticated technology and an equally sophisticated administrative system. The arts were alive, there was universal literacy, the philosophies flourished."

"Alain left the cell, left Police Headquarters and stood for a long time by a splashing fountain, staring into the clear water and watching the darting goldfish swimming in the narrow confines of the pool. Did they understand just how narrow their little universe was? he wondered. They seemed happy enough, if fish could be happy. But if they weren’t happy, he reflected, neither were they sad. They had no tradition but instinct, no ritual but the quest for food and a mate. He didn’t envy them much."

"Listening to the conversation, his faith in the stupidity of human nature was fully restored."

"Why ascribe meaning to all this? The further away from the fundamentals of life we go, the more we quest for their meaning. There is no meaning. It is here. It has always been here in some state. It will always be here. That is all we can ever truly know. It is all we should want to know."

"A threat to free speech. It was marvelous how they accepted the principles of democracy and rejected them at the same time by talk of mob action!"

"Any forthcoming dispute was likely to be a battle between ignorance of one sort and ignorance of another."

"Perhaps he was old and wise, perhaps he was just old."

"He existed in all the many dimensions of the multiverse. Yet he, in common with all others, was bound by the dimension of Time. He had cast off the chains of space but was tied, as perhaps all denizens of the multiverse would always be, by the imperturbable prowl of Time, which brooked no halt, which condoned no tampering with its movement, whether to slow it or to speed it. Time, the changer, could not be changed. Space, perhaps, the material environment, could be conquered. Time, never."

"The time has come for the dismantling of fantasies. That is already happening to our universe. Now that we have this one chance of survival we must finally rid ourselves of fantasies and seize that chance! For centuries our race has built on false assumptions. If you build a fantasy based on a false assumption and continue to build on such a fantasy, your whole existence becomes a lie which you implant in others who are too lazy or too busy to question its truth. In this manner you threaten the very existence of reality, because, by refusing to obey its laws, those laws engulf and destroy you. The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance. Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent. We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!"

"“He was a fool,” said Willow calmly to Klein. “There are many who refuse their responsibilities. Fooling themselves they search for a ‘higher ideal’. He was a fool.” “What are responsibilities?” said Klein laconically. “He knows. Responsibility, my dear, is another word for self-interest. For survival.” She looked at Klein uncomprehendingly."

"Again this is an old question, a bit trite from being asked too often, maybe, but how much of what we believe is true and how much is what we wish were true."

"The Dead God’s Book and the Golden Barge are one and the same. They have no real existence, save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge—the answer already is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it. A rather overemphasised fact, throughout history, but one generally ignored all the same."

"“And thank you, also, for the joke.” “The joke?” “Why truly—the best joke is but a simple statement of truth.”… He mounted, flapped the reins, and, as the gray gelding broke into a trot he said to himself: “A joke indeed, but it is a pity that men do not laugh at it more often.”"

"“Is there anything you need?” “Need? Aye. Peace of mind. Knowledge of my true destiny. A quiet place where I can be with Cymoril, whom I love.”"

"Like so many others he seemed to equate self-pity with artistic inspiration. In an earlier age he might have discovered his public and become quite rich (self-pity passing for passion in the popular understanding)."

"She opened her bag and made sure of her jar of instant coffee. It was the one thing she couldn’t get at the End of Time."

"Why hadn't the dead human race realized this? It was only necessary to exist, not to be trying constantly to prove you existed when the fact was plain. Plain to him, he realized, because he had climbed a mountain. This knowledge was his reward. He had not received any ability to think with greater clarity, or a vision to reveal the secret of the universe, or an experience of ecstasy. He had been given, by himself, by his own action, insensate peace, the infinite tranquility of existing."

"“Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was,” she was saying softly. “It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.”"

"Time and Matter are both ideas. Matter makes a more immediate impression on Man, but Time’s effects are longer lasting."

"You fail to understand, my friend. We do not control time. If anything, it controls us. We simply measure it."

"“I am already late, I fear. What time is it?” “Time? Why the present, of course.”"