123 quotes
Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939)
Every human being believes he is perfect in his way, even the most miserable scoundrel or dreamer.
Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.
The Big Time (1958)
No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything.
For what is life but greed in action?
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939)
No wonder without fear, no fear without wonder—that’s the rule for the cosmic weird tale and also the compensation for the pains of fear, the jewel in the toad’s head.
Terror, Mystery, Wonder (1980)
Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.
The Wanderer (1964)
Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939)
Girls had a way of blotting out all lesser, but not thereby despicable, delights. Girls were for dessert.
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939)
Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie
In the sky
When you die—
It’s a lie!
A Pail of Air (1964)
It was more a patriotic than religious matter with Fafhrd. He believed in Odin only during moments of sentimental weakness.
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939)
He knew that ahead lay many perils—threats to his bodily welfare. And recently Jarles had come to have a great respect for that bag of flesh and bones which contained his ego.
Gather, Darkness! (1950)
Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.
The Big Time (1958)
He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest With the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood.
The Green Millennium (1953)
Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.
The Big Time (1958)
What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?
Conjure Wife (1953)
He had the illusion, he said, of getting perilously close to the innermost secrets of the universe and finding they were rotten and evil and sardonic.
Night's Black Agents (1947)
The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.
The Wanderer (1964)
They sat in small parties with a truculent quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere.
The Green Millennium (1953)
Humans aren’t as you idealized them, Blanda. Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds, Blanda, and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex.
The Silver Eggheads (1962)