People From Birmingham

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

"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."

"Many men on earth have the vanity to believe in another life."

"A man's the same as the rest of us or 'e's a freak. Stands to reason."

"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."

"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."

"She had an exasperating feeling that there was a principle somewhere that she had missed; a principle which once grasped would make the whole thing as clear as daylight. But if there was it continued to elude her."

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

"Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there."

"She rummaged in a battered bag beside her, brought out a dirty spoon, and began to taste the beans as if they were one of the jams of paradise."

"How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process [...]"

"Safe passage along the catwalk of one's own racial code must be achieved through long experience; it is harder still to climb from it to another, and when that other is as involved as a maze and is entirely supported by incomprehensible misconceptions, a foot is bound to slip through the fabric from time to time."

"'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'"

"'You know perfectly well that women can and do - or rather did - handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.'"

"'We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.'"

"Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent."

"In the country you can at least grow things. You do have a chance. But a city is a sort of desert of bricks and stones. Once you've used up what is there, you're done for."

"WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT !"

"'Somehow running away seldom seems to work out well unless you have a pretty good idea what you're running to.""

"But we had learnt, as had many before us, about the bread-alone factor, one needed more than adequate food."

"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."

"Unfortunately there were certain persons with elastic principles."

"There's a type of woman who isn't content until she's made herself some man's slave and doormat—put herself completely in his power."

""This isn't a nice cosy world for anyone—especially not for anyone that's different," he said."

"What did I tell you?" said my neighbour excitedly. "Force of mind, that's what those people use; that's why their hands are vestigial. Pure will-power." The dwarf seemed to hear him, for he looked towards us. "I am surprised," he sneered, "that you even know of such a thing as will-power. I judged by your reflexes that you had only instincts."

"The creatures fling the most dangerous frequencies around, not only without effort but regardless of consequences."

"It boils down to this. If a man, any man, claims to have had an experience which is outside all normal experience, it will be inferred, will it not, that he is in some way not quite a normal man? A small cloud, a mere wrack, of doubt and risk begins to gather above him. It is tenuous, too insubstantial for him to disperse, yet it casts a faint, persistent shadow. There is, I imagine, no such thing as a normal human being, but there is a widespread feeling that there ought to be. Any organisation has a conception of 'the type of man we want here' which is regarded as the normal for its purposes. So every man there attempts more or less to accord to it - organisational man, in fact - and anyone who diverges more than slightly from the type in either his public, or in his private life does so to the peril of his career."

"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."

"To take an illustration—a bad one, I admit, but enough for our purpose—one may consider time as a river. You may turn boats adrift on it at many points, and they will all collect together at the same serious obstacle, whether they have travelled a hundred miles or two miles."

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

""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."

"What is the use of life?"

"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."

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

"It is a funny thing that for most men the whitest conscience is no protection from some apprehension in the presence of the police."

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

"'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.'"

"'But how can you stand it - just going on and on?' It is not easy sometimes - and some of us do give up, but that is a crime, because there is always chance. And it's not quite so monotonous as you think. Each transfer makes a difference. You feel as if the world had become a different place then. The spirit rises in you like sap in spring. . . . And those glands you think so much of are not entirely without effect, because you are never quite the same person with quite the same tastes. Even in one body tastes can change quite a lot in one lifetime, and they inevitably differ slightly between bodies. But you are the same person, you have your memory, yet you are young again, you're hopeful, the world looks brighter, you think you'll be wiser this time. . . . And then you fall in love again, just as sweetly and foolishly as before. It's wonderful - like a re-birth. You can only know just how wonderful if you have been fifty and then become twenty.' 'I can guess,' I said."

"She showed all that maternal solicitude which so oddly hopes that its child will be outstanding while being absolutely normal, distinguished while being indistinguishable."

""And it all comes of this gallivanting about the Universe. I never did think much of it. Stick to your own planet, is what I say; it's quite big enough. But will they? Not so's you'd notice it. They go flinging themselves into space, and then what happens?" He paused aggrievedly."

"A mind oppressed by a sense of sin can play a lot of nasty tricks. Nowadays they talk of guilt complexes and inhibitions. Names change: when I was a boy the same thing was known as a bad conscience . . ."

"Sooner or later the amateur always overreaches himself."

"Was she a bit mad?" "Mad? Oh, no - unless you would call a failure to grow up a kind of madness - in which case there would be very few sane people."

"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."

"There is a sense of reason's fingernails scrabbling to keep their hold, as one slides towards something which is not accountable; not, by ordinary standards, quite sane..."

"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."

"Dying," observed the doctor, "is such a very ordinary thing to do."