70 quotes
Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity.
I’m afraid I felt a straight pin of jealousy. Perfection does that to me.
Deathbird Stories (1975)
Empty winds howled down out of the tundras of his soul.
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966)
There comes a point in the downward slide of the human condition when a man ceases to be a man. He may still walk erect, but it is principally a matter of skeletal arrangement, not ethics.
Deathbird Stories (1975)
Were we in 1946 or even 1956, van Vogt would have already been able to hold the award aloft.
Anyone's demise or vanishment is in some small way tragic but the word "tragedy" requires greater measure for its use. … Van' s great mind now gone. Tragedy.
Where did he get jelly beans?
That's another good question. More than likely it will never be answered to your complete satisfaction. But then, how many questions ever are?
What he wrote was this: The great tragedy of my life is that in my search for the Holy Grail everyone calls True Love, I see myself as Zorro, a romantic and mysterious highwayman — and the women I desire see me as Porky Pig.
Grail (1981)
Bugfuck; you had to be crazy like Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft to write like that.
I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.
Shatterday (1980)
We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.
Eidolons (1988)
I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me — that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game. Because my immortal soul will be lost.
Since the first night of Man, hunkered down hairy and hungry by the primeval lightning-borne food fire, fear has been the prime mover. Forget momma love and posterity and men’s unquenchable curiosity. Fear is the principle mode of locomotion of homo sapiens.
Over the Edge (1970)
It was gibberish, but it was a deep gibberish, and if he kept talking, the beast would shuck off the thoughts rather than try to fathom them.
Over the Edge (1970)
Griffin stood silently, watching the waterfall, sensing more than he saw, understanding more than even his senses could tell him.
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966)
Art is not supposed to be easier!
There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems’ perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be assaulted daily by circumstances.
Shatterday (1980)
For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered.
His entire afterword to The Essential Ellison (1987)
All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night.
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966)
You create your own Heaven, and you have the opportunity to live in it, but you have to do it on your own terms, the highest terms of which you are capable.
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966)