Fantasy Authors

"He took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads. Paradine didn't see it at first, but Emma did. She wanted to play with it."

"Only babies spilled food, Emma had been told. As a result, she took such painstaking care in conveying her spoon to her mouth that Paradine got the jitters whenever he watched."

"Candidly, I don't see the point of teaching those apes philosophy. They're all at the wrong age. Their habit-patterns, their methods of thinking, are already laid down. They're horribly conservative, not that they'd admit it. The only people who can understand philosophy are mature adults or kids like Emma and Scotty."

"His find he hid at the back of the closet in his own room upstairs. The crystal cube he slipped into his pocket, which already bulged with string, a coil of wire, two pennies, a wad of tinfoil, a grimy defenses stamp, and a chunk of feldspar. Emma, Scott's two-year-old sister, waddled unsteadily in from the hall and said hello. "Hello, Slug," Scott nodded, from his altitude of seven years and some months. He patronized Emma shockingly, but she didn't know the difference. Small, plump, and wide-eyed, she flopped down on the carpet and stared dolefully at her shoes. "Tie 'em, Scotty, please?" "Sap," Scott told her kindly, but knotted the laces."

"The tiny people were deftly building a house. Scott wished it would catch fire, so he could see the people put it out. Flames licked up from the half-completed structure. The automatons, with a great deal of odd apparatus, extinguished the blaze. It didn't take Scott long to catch on. But he was a little worried. The manikins would obey his thoughts. By the time he discovered that, he was frightened, and threw the cube from him. Halfway up the bank, he reconsidered and returned."

"The soft, woven helmet was the first thing that caught his eye, but he discarded that without much interest. It was just a cap. Next he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm — much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block."

"Maybe it was a music box. Scott shouldn't have felt depressed. The gadgetry would have given Einstein a headache and driven Steinmetz raving mad. The trouble was, of course, that the box had not yet completely entered the space-time continuum where Scott existed and therefore it could not be opened. At any rate, not till Scott used a convenient rock to hammer the helical nonhelix into a more convenient position. He hammered it, in fact, from its contact point with the fourth dimension, releasing the space-time torsion it had been maintaining. There was a brittle snap. the box jarred slightly, and lay motionless, no longer only partially in existence. Scott opened it easily now."

"Having finished his supply of cheese, chocolate, and cookies, and having drained the soda-pop bottle to its dregs, Scott caught tadpoles and studied them with a certain amount of scientific curiosity. He did not persevere. Something tumbled down the bank, and thudded into the muddy ground near the water, so Scott, with a wary glance around, hurried to investigate. It was a box. It was, in fact, the Box. The gadgetry hitched to it meant little to Scott, though he wondered why it was so fused and burnt. He pondered. With his jackknife he pried and probed, his tongue sticking out from a corner of his mouth — Hm-m-m. Nobody was around. Where had the box come from? Somebody must have left it here, and sliding soil had dislodged it from its precarious perch."

"There was little time to waste. The Box was beginning to glow and shiver. Unthahorsten stared around wildly, fled into the next glossatch, and groped in a storage bin there. He came up with an armful of peculiar-looking stuff. Uh-huh. Some of the discarded toys of his son Snowen, which the boy had brought with him when he had passed over from Earth, after mastering the necessary technique. Well, Snowen needed this junk no longer. He was conditioned, and put away childish things. Besides, though Unthahorsten's wife kept the toys for sentimental reasons, the experiment was more important. Unthahorsten left the glossatch and dumped the assortment into the Box, slamming the cover shut just before the warning signal flashed. The Box went away."

"There's no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed since 1942 Anno Domini and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn't on Earth, technically speaking. He was doing the equivalent of standing in the equivalent of a laboratory. He was preparing to test his time machine."

"Truth will triumph. It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we're right back where we started from."

"Emily: Well, when he's in port, it's actually very tiny – about as big as my hand. And he keeps it on his mantel, in a bottle. He showed it to me once when he came to visit."

"Rhapsody: You know, you both really ought to have more respect for music. It can be a very powerful weapon, as well as whatever else you need it to be." Grunthor: That's true; my singin' voice can be quite good at inflictin' pain. At least that's what the troops use ta tell me."

"Grunthor: Well, sir, if we can't find work when we get out o' this stinkin' 'ole, maybe 'Er Ladyship 'ere will teach us some tunes and we can go on the road as a team of wanderin' troubadours. Oi can see it now: Doctor Uchmed's Travelin' Snake Show.""

"Achmed: How noble are you feeling, Grunthor? Grunthor: "Oi'm always noble, sir; it's in my blood. 'As been ever since Oi ate that knight a few years back."

"Achmed: She's a Singer; she may be prescient. Grunthor:"She certainly is, cute lit'le thing. Oi like 'er."

"Grunthor: It's enough just to know that you fell for me."

"Grunthor: Well, 'allo, Duchess! Oi was 'opin you'd drop in! Care for a spot o' tea?"

"Rhapsody father: "Panic will kill you, even when nothing else wants to."

"Rhapsody’s father: The water won't hurt you, it's the panic that will. Stay calm."

"Rhapsody:"I’m Lirin-" Grunthor:"'Ey, don't remind me. Oi ain't eaten recently.""

"Stop that immediately," he ordered harshly. "I forbid you to do that. If you want to come with us, you had best understand that you are never to do that again. Weeping and wailing is banned from here on out. Now decide. Come if you want to – if you can refrain from that noise."

"Young Rhapsody: What did you put in the water this time? Rhapsody's mother: Sit all the way down. Lavender, lemon verbena, rose hips, snow fern- Young Rhapsody: Snow fern? We eat that! Rhapsody's mother: "Exactly. Why do you think the water is so warm? I'm not bathing you, I'm making soup."

"Between shallow breaths she began to mutter a string of inspired curses more vile than either of the men remembered hearing, much to Grunthor's delight."

"Rhapsody: "I can sit watch. I have a dagger." Achmed: "Well, I for one will sleep much better now knowing you're protecting us, Rhapsody. Try not to hurt any small animals that might attack unless they're edible.""

"Achmed: This is Grunthor. No one has concealed that. Grunthor: Although you can always call me 'The Ultimate Authority, to Be Obeyed at All Cost.' My troops always does."

"Rhapsody: It's just that, well, in my limited experience, Firbolg are thought of as monsters. Grunthor: And in my not-so-limited experience, Lirin are thought of as appetizers."

"Grunthor replaced his helmet and turned to Rhapsody. He took one look at the expression on her face and roared with laughter. "'Allo, darlin'. Oi'm so glad to see it's love at first sight for you, too. Come along." He walked away into the night."

"Achmed Come with us if you want to live."

"Barney:He's become a lot more dangerous of late. And he has a lot more ears than he used to. Rhapsody:Oh dear. And he wasn’t all that attractive to begin with."

"Whate’er there be of Sorrow I’ll put off till To-morrow, And when To-morrow comes, why then ’T will be To-day and Joy again."

"May the Christmastide bear you to the highest level of your desires, and the ebbing year leave you stranded upon the Golden Shores of Peace, Prosperity and Happiness"

"For me, my craft is sailing on, Through mists to-day, clear seas anon. Whate’er the final harbor be ’T is good to sail upon the sea!"

"To-day, whatever may annoy, The word for me is Joy, just simple Joy."

"I went to a number of homes around the country, sometimes with my own spoons in my pocket, or I would select one at random from the family kitchen. Typically it was a boy under ten years of age who would lightly stroke the metal object at the narrow point of the handle while I held it between thumb and forefinger at the end of the handle. The spoon would soon slowly bend, creating two 360-degree twists in the handle, perfectly emulating what Geller demonstrated on television. No tricks, no magic potions, just innocent children (with normal children's fingers) who had not yet learned that it could not be done. (Professor John Hasted, Chairman of the Department of Physics at Birkbeck College in London, also conducted extensive experiments with children in England, as did physicist Ted Bastin. Both found numerous children who could bend the metal without any physical contact.) The evidence continued to mount in this way, suggesting that these strange capabilities were quite natural and likely common in humans, though latent and seldom manifest. It occurred to me that we were possibly seeing the emergence of an evolutionary attribute, or the residue from an earlier one that was now fading."

"I have never claimed that Geller was authentic, or that the Society had any opinion as to Geller's authenticity. I only said that I know of no way that he could have used trickery to do these things. That is a fact."

"The things that always seem to work are the things that any magician can duplicate. Randi's quite right to point that out. But that's not because I'm doing a conjuring trick. You'd think that whatever causes these things to happen doesn't want them to be proved."

"The weakness of the attack lies in its lack of discrimination. It is possible that psychic surgery is a hoax, that plants cannot really read our minds, that Kirlian photography (photographing the "life-aura" of living creatures) may depend on some simple electrical phenomenon. But to lump all of these together as if they were all on the same level of improbability shows a certain lack of discernment. The same applies to the list of "hoaxes." Rhine's careful research into extrasensory perception at Duke University is generally conceded to be serious and sincere, even by people who think his test conditions were too loose. The famous fairy photographs are quite probably a hoax, but no one has ever produced an atom of proof either way, and until someone does, no one can be quite as confident as the editors of Time seem to be. And Ted Serios has never at any time been exposed as a fraud — although obviously he might be. We see here a phenomena that we shall encounter again in relation to Geller: that when a scientist or a "rationalist" sets himself up as the defender of reason, he often treats logic with a disrespect that makes one wonder what side he is on."

"Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way."

"Time did a devastating hatchet job on Uri Geller (and others). Time selected those events and circumstances thoroughly discrediting Geller. Time also grouped such meticulous researchers as Charles Tart with highly suspect and careless showmen, tarring all with the same brush. Guilt by association is hardly objective journalism. Nevertheless most "nonordinary" phenomena are subjective and not amenable to cultural "prediction and control." This has been one issue of my book. Should Geller-type material become fully acceptable within such channels of the culture such as Time, we would know that the cultural force would have absorbed, and not destroyed, the Crack-sign value of such phenomena. When those working in the field of "nonordinary" phenomena stop trying to prove to the Establishment, they will make a great leap forward. Anonymity is the direction."

"Those responding to Geller's phenomenon by "bending forks" themselves, were following the same pattern. Their ego "roof-brain" had nothing to do with it (and they also hadn't yet learned fully enough that the act was impossible)."

"I'll no longer say that I have supernatural powers. I am an entertainer. I want to do a good show. My entire character has changed."

"I don't care what those schmucks think. I'm a millionaire."

"OK, David. Here we are on the train to Exeter, to the football club of which I am joint chairman, and where we're doing a charity show with Michael Jackson. You and I have both demonstrated some of the hidden powers of the mind and it would be interesting to hear, David, how you explain some of your incredible achievements."

"I can say with absolute certainty I do not cheat. I am not a magician."

"My boss treated me like a slave and I felt completely degraded. Then, just once, I did a terrible thing - I peed in his tea! Watching him drink it, my grudges completely dissolved - I never minded making tea for him again."

"Like I told you, I'm not a magician," he says. "If something isn't working, I don't try to guess."

"The black arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future, ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless unconsidered mock-time, when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits all (except, if there be, the most unhappiest) of human kind: I was not, I lived and loved, I am not."

"Can a woman not keep her lover without she study to always please him with pleasure? Pew! then let her give up the game. Or shall my lover think with pleasing of me to win me indeed? Faugh! he payeth me then; doth he think I am for hire?"

"'I will give your ladyship the answer I gave before,' said that old man, who had sat motionless, serene and undisturbed, darting his bright and eager glance from painter to sitter and to painter again, and smiling as if with the aftertaste of ancient wine. 'You do marvel that his grace will still consume himself with striving to fix in art, in a seeming changelessness, those self-same appearances which in nature he prizeth by reason of their very mutability and subjection to change and death. Herein your ladyship, grounding yourself first unassailably upon most predicamental and categoric arguments in celarent, next propounded to me a syllogism in barbara, the major premiss whereof, being well and exactly seen, surveyed, overlooked, reviewed and recognized, was by my demonstrations at large convicted in fallacy of simple conversion and not per accidens; whereupon, countering in brahmantip, I did in conclusion confute you in bokardo, showing, in brief, that here there is no marvel; since 'tis women's minds alone are ruled by clear reason: men's are fickle and elusive as the jack-o'-lanterns they pursue.' 'A very complete and metaphysical answer,' said she. 'Seeing 'tis given on my side, I'll let it stand without question; though (to be honest) I cannot tell what the dickens it means.' 'To be honest, madam,' said the Duke, 'I paint because I cannot help it.'"