Fantasy Authors

"“That sounds simple enough,” Mishkin said. “It is, theoretically.” “But practically?” “There are always complications.” “Such as?” “If we knew that,” the computer told him, “the complications wouldn’t be very complicated, would they?”"

"“You want me to tell you why reality is the way it is,” Seethwright said. “But there is no explanation for that. You must simply learn to fit your preconceptions to what you find. You must not expect reality to adapt itself to you, except very infrequently."

"The robot children said, “Sure, Grandfather,” and went away laughing behind his back. They were smooth and sharp and bright, and they thought that they were the only ones who had ever been modern, and it never occurred to them that others had been so before them and that others would be so after them. And if they had been told that someday they would be put back on the shelf with other pieces of discarded merchandise they would have laughed all the harder. That is the way of young robots and no amount of programming seems able to change it."

"Blount’s face registered psychopathic amazement, idiot incredulity, moronic disbelief."

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

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

"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?"

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

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.” “What’s that?” Carmody asked. “It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, ‘Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.’ The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.” “I think I see what you mean,” Carmody said. “I’ve made it too complicated,” Maudsley said. “There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.” “What’s that?” “Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?”"

"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."

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

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

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

"How nicely you put it! We may rant against fortune and the world, but we are left at the end with the stark proposition: “These are the things which are.”"

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

"Not even the thought of death can upset the man who is going into space for the first time. The journey into the unknown transcends the framework of anxiety, at least for a while."

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

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

"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."

"“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.”"

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"“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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

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

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

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

"But the description is not the described, as Amirra Tauba remarked as he chewed up the map of the galaxy!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"It wouldn’t be so bad. There was, after all, a certain joy in hard, dedicated work, a sort of pleasure in denying oneself pleasures, and a sour happiness to be found in steadiness, circumspection, dependability… To hell with that!"

"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."

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

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