Jews From The United States

"The only thing to think over was Me, of course. And the real problem about Me was, What was I supposed to do? Was I meant to be nothing but God? I had tried the God business and found it too limited. It was a job for a simple-minded egomaniac. There had to be something else for me to do—something more meaningful, more expressive of my true self. I’m convinced of it! That is my problem, and that is the question I ask of you: What am I to do with myself?"

"A little prescience goes a long way, especially in a galaxy as disorganized as this one."

"A malfunction of this type can be cured only by changing the nature of the universe, which is, of course, impractical."

"I’ll follow the reedy tenor of his excuses and blast them with the bellowy bass of irrefutable logic!"

"Carmody’s jaw stiffened and he withdrew his hand. He had been pushed around long enough. Now, for the sake of his own self-esteem, he would not yield any more."

"“Earth, Earth,” the short, alien Carmody mused. “I think I remember the name now. There was a recent study of isolated worlds and the peculiarities of their development. Earth was mentioned as a planet covered with an obsessively overproductive species. Object manipulation is their outstanding modality. Their project is an attempt to live in their own, ever-accumulating waste products. In short, Earth is diseased place. I believe it is being phased out of the Galactic Master Plan on the basis of chronic cosmic incompatibility. The place will then be rehabilitated and turned into a refuge for daffodils.”"

"“Machines!” the Clerk said scornfully. “We have many of them, some exquisitely complex. But event the best of them are much like idiot savants. They do adequately on tedious straightforward tasks like building stars or destroying planets. But give them something tough, like solacing a widow, and they simply go to pieces. Would you believe it, the largest computer in our section can landscape an entire planet; but it cannot fry an egg or carry a tune, and it knows less about ethics than a newborn wolf cub. Would you want something like that to run your life?” “Of course not,” Carmody said. “But couldn’t someone build a machine with creativity and judgment?” “Someone has,” the Clerk said. “It has been designed to learn from experience, which means that it must make errors in order to arrive at truths. It comes in many shapes and sizes, most of them quite portable. Its flaws are readily apparent, but seem to exist as necessary counterweights to it virtues. No one has yet improved on the basic design, though many have tried. This ingenious device is called ‘intelligent life.’”"

"“Well, no sense crying over unspilt blood,” the Prize Clerk said. “If we took full account of our eventualities, we’d soon run out of eventualities for us to take full account of.”"

"He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable—a routine miracle."

"In a way it made no difference, since nothing is permanent except our illusions."

"Last week we revoked his Godhead; we caught him operating a life without a license."

"All men are mortal, he tells us, but some are more mortal than others."

"Nature abhors a vacuum, and I don’t like it much either."

"“I feel no moral compunction in the slightest at my so-called crime. If a man cannot retain control of his own body, then he deserves to lose it. I have observed, during a long and varied lifetime, that men will give their bodies to any rogue who asks, and will enslave their minds to the first voice that commands them to obey. This is why the vast majority of men cannot keep even their natural birthright of a mind and body, but choose instead to rid themselves of those embarrassing emblems of freedom.” “That,” Detective Urdorf said, “is the classic apologia of the criminal.” “That which you call a crime when one man does it,” Kraggash said, “you call government when many men do it. Personally, I fail to see the distinction; and failing to see it, I refuse to live by it.”"

"Our roles are chose for us in this world by the stern dictates of an unrelenting Fate; and many a man who thought to play the emperor on Life’s stage found himself cast for a corpse instead."

"Thus action serves as anodyne, whereas contemplation is revealed as the most direct form of involvement, and therefore much shunned by men."

"“Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.” Marvin nodded. “Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,” he replied, “this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.”"

"And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forego pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death."

"“The acceptance of indeterminacy is the beginning of wisdom,” the hermit quoted."

"All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth or falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics."

"“You might say that,” Flynn said, thus avoiding an outright lie, since anyone might say anything whether it was true or not."

"Quite in vain did several lawyers point out to him that, if justice really existed, there would be no need for law and lawmakers, and thus one of mankind’s noblest conceptions would be obliterated, and an entire occupational group would be thrown out of work. For it is the essence of the law, they told him, that abuses and outrages should exist, since these discrepancies served as proof and validation of the necessity of law, and of justice itself."

"Marvin did not give way to despair. He gave way instead to anger, which was a much healthier emotion, though equally unproductive."

"You have been bitten by the travel bug, which is very suitable for your time of life, and is a passion akin to falling in love, or fighting an idealistic war, or becoming disillusioned with the world, and other postures of the young."

"“Hey, what is this,” he asked. “I guess maybe you could call it like love,” Caroline said. “Whaddaya mean, love?” Chet asked. “Your contract expressly forbids you to fall in love during the duration of your tenth kill, and it furthermore explicitly forbids you to fall in love with your Victim.” “Love,” Caroline said coolly, “existed a long time before contracts.” “Contracts,” Martin said viciously, “are a lot more enforceable than love.”"

"For love, as he knew it, was an aberration, a form of temporary insanity, a short-lived state of autosuggestion."

"Love is a wonderful game which begins in fun and ends in marriage."

"For Polletti, experience had brought only the bitter residue of pleasure which is the true essence of disenchantment. Certain delights which in his youth had seemed unique and unobtainable had turned out, upon acquisition, to be infinitely and drearily repeatable."

"One moment’s inattention, and the long expected death came at last—unexpectedly! In that agonized moment, sprawled helpless upon the uncaring ground, Polletti realized that no preparation for one’s own death is possible. Death has had too much experience in catching men off guard, in piercing their attitudes and reducing their poses."

"He shook his head violently, pulled himself together and swallowed a stiff dose of Infradex, a drug designed to alleviate drug reactions. Within seconds he was his old, normally depressed self. This cheered him considerably, and he left the hut in a mood teetering on the edge of equanimity."

"She was an extremely attractive woman if you like the type, which could best be described as homicidal schizophrenic paranoiac with kittenish overtones."

"Even rulers, notoriously the slowest of men to change, realized that something had to be done."

"It was as easy as falling off a precipice."

"For the question inevitably remains, is Polletti’s admission of fear a magnificent conquest of the unconquerable, or a mere admission of the inadmissable?"

"Rome has an ambiance, puerile yet unmatchable. Rome hints at the possibility of becoming the main actor in the drama of one’s own life. (The hint is false, of course; but the stolid northern cities do not even possess the hint.)"

"Why, after all, did I have to live with reality? Wasn’t illusion a perfectly suitable condition?"

"Above all, I share in our national preoccupation with exotic danger. Strange lands and mysterious women are never far from my thoughts. My manner is commonplace; but always, as I walk down the matter-of-fact streets of my city, I am listening to waves explode across a coral reef, or wandering through weed-strangled alleys in some lost jungle civilization."

"So that is how they play this game, I thought, maudlin with self-pity. You run and dodge and improvise and finally reach the desired sanctuary, only to find that the rules have been changed and the sanctuary has become the enemy stronghold and that you have actually lost. But of course, I had forgotten: this game had no rules."

"I gave up my dream of flight and rebirth, and invented a proverb to fit the occasion: he who produces an illusion is more likely than anyone else to be taken in by it. The thought gave me very little comfort."

"How does the fool build his paradise?—out of the crumbling bricks of illusion and the watery cement of hope."

"In the maze of Venice it is difficult to find anything quickly; but it is equally difficult to lose anything for long."

"The coincidence would be too great anywhere except in Venice, where the machinery of illusion delights in casting up the improbable, the unusual, and the unexpected. There is a price, of course; by tampering with probabilities, Venice induces a deterioration in the commonplace—to her disadvantage."

"I recognized this as one of the illusions that Venice casts over the visitor. This cunning city fostered and endless capacity for self-deception. Labyrinthine, it encouraged convoluted thinking. It was the spell of Venice that lured Guesci into expending the maximum of guile for the minimum of effect."

"“I just want to get Karinovsky out of here in the simplest, safest way.” “Your terms are mutually contradictory,” Guesci said. “In Venice, that which is simple is rarely safe; and that which is safe is much too complicated even to consider.”"

"But still, we encounter difficulties. The nature of the city operates against us. Venice owes its very existence to the art of illusion—which is one of the Black Arts. It is a city of mirrors; the canals reflect the buildings, the windows reflect the canals. Distances slide and twist, earth and water interpenetrate. Venice advertises its falsehoods and conceals its truths. In a city like this, events cannot be predicted as in Genoa or Milan. The relative and conditional are apt to turn into the absolute and irrevocable without notice."

"I think he suspected I was lying; but it was the sort of large-scale, flamboyant lie that appealed to him. As he told me later, only pettiness annoyed him. He delighted in color and movement, and in the protean appearance of things. In this respect, he told me, he was a true Venetian. Like many other subjects of the Serenissima, he believed in style over content, art over life, appearance over reality, and form over substance. He believed simultaneously in fate and free will. He viewed life as a sort of Renaissance melodrama, complete with unexpected appearances and disappearances, heartrending confrontations, preposterous coincidences, disguises and doubles, switched twins and mysteries of birth; all revolving around an obscure and melancholy point of honor. And, of course, he was perfectly right."

"One does not fall in love by exercise of reason and good taste; one simply falls, and invents ingenious reasons afterwards. One falls in love with one’s fatality, whether it be a woman or a city."

"Man is the only animal whose fear of embarrassment can overcome his instinct for self-preservation."

"He had poured too much gilt on the lily; in striving to create a paragon, he had only succeeded in producing a paradox."

"“Strange,” he said in a conversational voice, “how, for some men, the possession of a gun acts as a powerful intoxicant. It destroys the reasoning faculties, eh, Carlo?”"