Algis Budrys

"We are born of Humankind— This our destiny: To bitter dwell in discontent Wherever we may be."

"Are our souls so much perverted? Can we not relent? Or are the stars the madman’s cost For his inborn discontent?"

"Only gods and television audiences see the pattern of human events."

"Charging back and forth isn’t progress. Small but steady forward motion is."

"By the time of his adolescence, he had discovered an absolute lack of involvement with the human race. He studied it, because it was the salient feature of his environment. He did not live with it. It said nothing to him that was of personal value; its motivations, morals, manners and morale did not find responsive reactions in him. And his, of course, made absolutely no impression on it."

"The idea was to hang on to reality. It was the one crutch everybody used."

"I do what seems best—I live, I let live; so far I’ve done well. I don’t see why I should act like a predator, simply because I’m in a predatory society. I’m a human being, I’m myself—if I make my life something vicious, who’ll give me another if, too late, I regret what I’ve done?"

"He wondered, as he often had during his life, at people’s ability to think so intricately and to still be wrong."

"“Can I drive you down to your house?” The man flicked an expressive glance along the car’s length and shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll walk. There’s still a law of averages.” And you can take that phrase and carve it on Humanity’s headstone, Fay thought bitterly, but did not reply."

"Williamson threw his hands carefully up to heaven and snorted again. Apparently, everything Fay said served to confirm some judgment of mankind on his part."

"“You look like any other brainless jackanapes,” he mused, “but apparently there’s some gray matter left in your artfully coiffed skull after all.”"

"There are various uses for time, and I have better ones than this."

"Young man, you’re living proof that our basic policy is right. I wouldn’t trust an ignoramus like you with the information required to cut his throat."

"Amnesia was the price of immortality."

"Wasn’t being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?"

"There has to be an end somewhere, he thought. Each thing has to end, or there will never be any room for beginnings."

"Sentiment was the easy thing. But logic reminded a man that some people insisted on living their neighbor’s lives, that some people were offensive. There were people with moral codes they clung to and lived by, people who worshiped in what they held to be the only orthodox way, people who clung to some idea—some rock on which their lives rested. Well and good. But if they tried to inflict these reforms on their neighbors, patience could only go so far, and the tolerance of fanaticism lasts just so long."

"“Armies!” he burst out. “The day Freemen organize to invade another area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their homes and families. They become a separate class—an armed, organized class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on that day, freedom dies for everybody."

"It isn’t given to very many men to have their dreams come true in their lifetimes."

"It hadn’t had to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at his vitals. But he’d known it was coming, as every man knows and tries to forget it is coming."

"Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to."

"Does it not seem to you, Justice Joyce, that this series of statistics might well occur without the intervention of any Divine Will whatsoever?"

"There’re limits to what civilized people can bring out into the open, no matter how savagely they can speculate."

"That was the way things worked out: you got a certain fair share of good breaks from life, and you had no right to expect things your way every time."

"Of course, you have to remind yourself that you might be seeing things that were never there. You might be maneuvering your memories to bring them into line with what you’d want them to be. You can’t be sure you’re not just daydreaming."

"“There’re all kinds of people in this world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There’s the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there’s the people who do the moving. It’s safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you’re pushed. You don’t take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you’re told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish. “Being a mover isn’t safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn’t comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what’s more, it’s up to you to get your own fish. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.” He looked into Hawks’ eyes. “Isn’t it?”"

"Claire threw her head and laughed. “There are all kinds of men. The only kind that’re worth anyone’s time are the ones I can’t mangle the first time out.”"

"There are the people in this world who act, and the people who scheme. The ones who act get things done, and the ones who scheme try to take credit for it. You must know that as well as I do."

"Look, if I could guarantee what the results were going to be, I wouldn’t need a research program!"

"A man is a phoenix, who must be reborn from his own ashes, for there is no other like him in the universe. If the wind stirs the ashes into a clumsy parody, then the phoenix is dead forever. Nothing we know of can bring you back."

"He saw Hawks, grunted, hefted the bottle and said, “I hate the stuff. It tastes lousy, it makes me gag, it stinks, and it burns my mouth. But they keep putting it in your hands, and they keep saying ‘Drink up!’ to each other, and ‘What’s the matter, Charlie, falling a little behind, there? Freshen up that little drinkee for you?” Until you feel like a queer of some kind, and a bore for the times you say you don’t want another one, positively. And they fill their folklore with it, until you wouldn’t dream you were having a good time unless you’d swilled enough of the stuff to poison yourself all the next day. And they talk gentleman talk about it—ages and flavors and brands and blends, as if it wasn’t all ethanol in one concentration or another. Have you ever heard two Martini drinkers in a bar, Hawks? Have you ever heard two shamans swapping magic?”"

"I know what Claire is. You know I know it. I told you the first minute I met you. But did you ever stop to think it’s all worth it to me? Every time she makes a pass at another man, I know she’s comparing. She’s out on the open market, shopping. And being shopped for. I don’t have any collar around her neck She’s not tame. I’m not a habit to her. I’m not something she’s tied to by any law. And every time she winds up coming back to me, you know what that proves. It proves I’m still the toughest man in the pack. Because she wouldn’t stay if I wasn’t."

"The universe has resources of death which we have barely begun to pick at."

"“Death is in the nature of the universe, Barker. Death is only the operation of a mechanism. All the universe has been running down from the moment of its creation. Did you expect a machine to care what it acted upon? Death is like sunlight or a falling star; they don’t care where they fall. Death cannot see the pennants on a lance, or the wreath of glory in a dying man’s hand. Flags and flowers are the inventions of life. When a man dies, he falls into enemy hands—an ignorant enemy, who doesn’t merely spit on banners but who doesn’t even know what banners are. No ordinary man could stand to find that out. You found it out today. You sat in the laboratory and were speechless at the injustice of it. You’d never thought that justice was only another human invention.”"

"Now you think about this, too: you’re not charming, dashing, or debonair. You’re funny looking, as a matter of fact. You’re too busy to spare much time for me, and even if you did take me out night-clubbing somewhere, you’d be so out of place that I couldn’t enjoy it. But you do one thing: you let me feel that my rules are as worthwhile to me as yours are to you. When you ask me to do something, I know you won’t be hurt if I refuse. And if I do it, you don’t feel that you’ve scored a point in some kind of complex game. You don’t try to use me, cozen me, or change me. I take up as much room in the world, the way you see it, as you do. Do you have any idea of how rare a thing that is?"

"Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow was always better, for someone. The difficult task lay in ensuring that the someone was one of yours."

"There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase."

"Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middle-aged philosophers."

"“You’re sincere enough.” She laughed shortly. “Heaven protect the human race from the sincere idealist!”"

"People want to be safe, and comfortable. If safety and comfort is to be found in guns, then they will take up guns—of their own accord, in their own need. And when safety and comfort are found in libraries, then the guns rust."

"And, in Cot’s mind as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame was disastrous and disgusting as a public horror."

"The dead must not rise—they undermine everything their dying created."

"Never try to reason with a man who can see the blade swinging for his head."

"Always lobbying for his own emotions, he was the perfect man for a job the administration had tacitly committed to ineptitude."

"Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself?"

"“Smart isn’t ‘Can you do it, is it good to do?’ Smart is ‘Can you make ’em believe what you’re doing is real?’ And real is ‘Can you get financing for it?’”"

"That was a classic maniacal farrago, and it boils down to his not being able to understand the world. It wasn’t necessary to count the contradictions after the first one."

"Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horsewhippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end—it was simply a fact of life that operated more slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not."

"Loss of dignity is after all one of the basics to a good punchy gag."

"I wonder if time-traveling cultures are playing with us. I wonder if they process our history for entertainment values."