Short Story Writers From England

"It is what has happened, and is happening now, that determines the future. Therefore, there must be a great number of possible futures, each a possible consequence of what is being done now."

"It takes civilised people quite a while to appreciate 'the big lie' technique."

"The fact that we don't know how to do it doesn't prove its impossibility."

"Doubtless the first arrow did not kill a lion."

"'Thank you, Hester,' Janet said, as she leaned back against the cushion placed behind her. Not that it was necessary to thank a robot, but she had a theory that if you did not practise politeness with robots you soon forgot it with other people."

"The English," [Vinski] remarked at length, "have a saying that possession is nine points of the law. It is just the kind of sentiment one would expect to find in a capitalist country."

"There are, of course, risks. In fact, there are three distinct kinds of risk: the known ones which we can and shall prepare against; the known ones which we must trust to luck to avoid; and the entirely unknown."

"The world has so multiplied the causes of fear that no one is left entirely unafraid."

"Poor baby, what a world to come into."

"Knowledge?" said the doctor. "Yes, I suppose that is it. For ever and for ever seeking knowledge. And we don't even know why we seek it. It's an instinct, like self-preservation; and about as comprehensible. Why, I wonder, do I keep on living. I know I've got to die sooner or later, yet I take the best care I can that it shall be later instead of finishing the thing off in a reasonable manner. After all, I've done my bit—propagated my species, and yet for some inscrutable reason I want to go on living and learning. Just an instinct. Some kink in the evolutionary process caused this passion for knowledge, and the result is man—an odd little creature, scuttling around and piling up mountains of this curious commodity. What do you suppose will happen when one day a man sits back in his chair and says: 'Knowledge is complete'? You see, it just sounds silly. We're so used to collecting it, that we can't imagine a world where it is all collected and finished."

""I'm afraid I'm not very good at understanding things like that." "You say that, but what you really mean is: 'I don't want to understand things like that.' " "It's true," she admitted."

"We have had a glorious past—but a glorious past is bitterness for a child with a hopeless future."

"Fate is not above using inconsiderable details for her obscure purpose."

"Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence."

"I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company."

""Now," said Miss Arbuthnot, "I expect you'll want to see your personality-coach." [...] "Light vivacity, light vivacity, just say it to yourself over and over whenever you're doing nothing in particular - and even if you are." "But is that really my personality? Is it the real me?" asked Peggy. Miss Carnegie raised her eyebrows. "Your personality?" she said, then she smiled. "Oh, I see. Oh dear, you have got a lot to learn, haven't you? You're confusing us with the television side, I'm afraid. Screen personality is quite different. Oh, yes, indeed. A few years ago it was sultry, then we had sparkling for a time, then we had a stretch of sincerity - let me see what came next? Oh, yes, smouldering, and, for a rather brief time, ingenuousness - but that doesn't suit modern audiences, silly to try it, really - then there was a spell of passionpent - the audiences liked that all right, but it was exceedingly trying for everyone else. This season it's lightly vivacious. So just keep on saying it to yourself until you come to me again next Wednesday. Light-vivacity, light vivacity! Try to throw your weight a little more forward on your toes, you'll find that'll help. Light-vivacity, light-vivacity!" And then to her coiffeur, to her facial-artist, to her deportment-instructor, to her dietician, to a number of others, until, finally, to Miss Higgins."

"'In point of fact our ascendancy has been so complete that we are rarely called upon to kill wolves nowadays - in fact, most of us have quite forgotten what it means to have to fight in a personal way against another species. But, when the need arises we have no compunction in fully supporting those who slay the threat whether it is from wolves, insects, bacteria, or filterable viruses; we give no quarter, and certainly expect no pardon.'"

"'The wise lamb does not enrage the lion,' he said. 'It placates him, plays for time, and hopes for the best.'"

"WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT !"

"Unfortunately there were certain persons with elastic principles."

"My impression was of an uncomfortably industrious place where there always seemed to be more jobs than people, unless one was careful, so on this particular evening I contrived to lie low until routine sounds told me that it was near enough to the mealtime for me to show myself safely."

"'Nobody,' she said, 'nobody but a child, or a child-minded person, expects life to be fair.'"

"'If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does. . . .'"

"'Cruelty is as old as life itself.'"

"Pretty girls are lovely as the flowers in May, but there are so many flowers in May."

"She doesn't think about anything—she's sort of programmed, like a computer. There's a conditioned response system. She hears, and then acceptance, rejection, and reaction drums go click-click-click, and the answer comes out sort of codified, just exactly right for people who use the same code." "Isn't that a little intolerant?" Francis had suggested. "After all, aren't we all rather like that if we consider ourselves honestly?" "To some degree," Zephanie admitted. "Only some people seem to be rigged always to play the house—like fruit machines."

"Look at us—thousands more of us every day. . . In a century or so, we shall be in the Age of Famines. We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn't solution, and when the breakdown comes there'll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison. I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. 'That's their worry,' we say. 'Damn our children's children; we're all right.' ... [...] Like any other animal that overbreeds we shall starve; we shall starve in our millions, in the blackest of all dark ages."

"We shan't get homo superior without any birth-pangs."

""Darling, you're talking as if all normal-length lives were planned. They aren't, you know. People have to learn how to live them—and by the time they find out, they're nearly gone. No time to remedy mistakes."

"The frustrations are still buzzing about, and soon they are going to find a new place to swarm."

""But if they change me shape, and change me voice, and change me hair and change me face, as they say, what is it that is me, at all?" asked Peggy."

"In the profession of wifehood the exams begin at the church door—and there is never a final degree."

"Truth is not altered by belief or disbelief."

"What is life anyway? - some kind of seed floating about the universe until it finds suitable conditions to develop? May be. Lord knows what there may be in all this Space. Perhaps we were once a few chance spores; perhaps there are a lot of different kinds of life floating about waiting for time to give them their chance . . ."

"Hobbies are convenient in the child, but irritant in the adult; which is why women are careful never to have them, but simply to be interested in this and that."

"'Ingenious you certainly were - like monkeys. But you neglected your philosophers - to your own ruin. Each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. You just pushed it into your system - a system already suffering from hardening of the arteries. And you were a greedy people. You took each discovery as if it were a bright new garment, but when you put it on you wore it over your old, verminous rags. You had grave need of disinfectants.'"

"I suppose one could scarcely have had innocence and experience. Being young is very exhausting and unsatisfactory, really—although it looks so nice."

"No discovery is good or evil until men make it that way."

"'In spite of what they say, two can't live as cheap as one. And wives hanker after certain standards, and ought to have them - within reason, of course.'"

"'In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity.' She paused. 'Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely - not because one wishes them to live for ever.'"

"I guess——" she said, wistfully—"I guess the only thing that's wrong with children is that they grow up to be people like you."

"“Lady,” he said, “some place there’s several freight cars of trouble marked 'Rush', and they’re all headed your way.”"

"Other things than to fight, there is, even for dragons."

"Sooner or later the amateur always overreaches himself."

"It was so absurd to die at sixty, anyway, and, as he saw it, it would be even more wasteful to die at eighty. A scheme of things in which the wisdom acquired in living was simply scrapped in this way was, to say the least, grossly inefficient. What did it mean? That somebody else would have to go through the process of learning all that life had already taken sixty years to teach him; and then be similarly scrapped in the end. No wonder the race was slow in getting anywhere—if, indeed, it were getting anywhere—with this cat-and-mouse, ten-forward-and-nine-back system."

"And there was another thing, too. No matter what your business is, some gals ain't got no standard of affection except how much you neglect it for 'em. Seems they just got to back themselves against it—and they got it all nicely fixed so they win both ways. If you don't neglect it, you ain't lovin' them enough; if you do, they reckoned you were that kind of sap, anyway."

"'Do you never work? Does nobody work?' I asked Clytassamine. 'Oh yes - if he wants to,' she said. 'But what about the unpleasant things - the things that must be done?' 'What things?' she asked, puzzled. 'Well, growing food, providing power, disposing of waste, all that kind of thing.' She looked surprised. 'Why, naturally, the machines do all that. You wouldn't expect men to do those things. Good heavens, what have we got brains for?" 'But who looks after the machines - keeps them in order?' 'Themselves, of course.'"

"Ever seen an old man just sitting in the sun, taking it easy? It doesn't have to mean he's senile. It may do, but very likely he can snap out of it and put his mind to work again if it gets really necessary. But mostly he finds it not worth the bother. Less trouble just to let things happen.'"

"I'd begun to grasp the principle that the less anybody knows, the less any squealer can give away. And it was easy to see that in a place where questioning was liable to assume the aspect of a blood-sport, the less one did know about other people's business, the better."

"I suppose we all have a number of carefully furnished, non-communicating rooms in our minds."