115 quotes
You don’t know what it’s like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know—and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice—only fortuity, pure and simple.
The Dream Master (1966)
My mind spun for a second before it drifted, and in that second I knew that of all pleasures—a drink of cold water when you are thirsty, liquor when you are not, sex, a cigarette after many days without one—there is none of them can compare with sleep. Sleep is best....
This Immortal (1966)
I don't know what I'll be writing a few years from now. I have some ideas — I have lots of different things I want to try. I almost don't really care what history thinks. I like the way I'm being treated right now.
On how he would like to be remembered (1994)
It is a city of neat cottages and cobbled streets where wander cats without number, for the enlightened legislators of long ago laid down laws for our protection. A good, kind village, where travelers take their ease and pet the cats, making much of them, which is as it should be.
A Night in the Lonesome October (1993)
This day she’ll off across the sky on her own wild ways to show.…
There, in the worlds of the Life and the Death, the worlds that she used to know.
Now, some say her name is Mercy and others say it’s Lust. Her secret name is Isis. Her secret soul is dust.
Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969)
“Cute,” she said, smiling. “If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.”
Unicorn Variations (1983)
I had wanted to go after her, to explain my part in what had happened. But I knew it would do no good, so why lose face? When a fairy tale blows up and the dream dust settles and you find yourself standing there, knowing that the last line will never be written, why not omit any exercises in futility?
Isle of the Dead (1969)
Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands—alternately cool, warm, moist and dry—a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spit-flecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience.
Isle of the Dead (1969)
Life is seldom so pivotally crisis-conditioned a thing as novelists would have us believe. While it is true that we sometimes recover from shocks with a sense of the freshness of reality and the wonder of existence, this state of mind does pass away—and fairly rapidly, at that—leaving both reality and ourselves untransfigured once more.
Today We Choose Faces (1973)
“...And I have seen stranger things in a long and colorful career.”
“Exactly. So what is the problem in believing my story?”
“You’ve nothing to back it up with. Even if you’re right, I’m still right in not believing without evidence.”
Roadmarks (1979)
“And your oath? To right wrongs, to punish the wicked…?”
“The longer I lived the more difficult it became to determine what was a wrong and who was wicked. Make it clear to me again and I may go back into business.”
The Last Defender of Camelot (1980)
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.
Lord of Light (1967)
Nick swore he’d die with this boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they’d cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he’d picked up in the hospital. That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I’d been a pallbearer.
Isle of the Dead (1969)
“You were both correct,” said Morningstar. “It is the same thing that you both describe, although neither of you sees it as it really is. Each of you colors reality in keeping with your means of controlling it. For if it is uncontrollable, you fear it. Sometimes then, you color it incomprehensible. In your case, a machine; in theirs, a demon.”
Jack of Shadows (1971)
“Statistics aren’t the same thing as destiny, Bennie. Everybody makes his own.”
“Statistics or destiny?”
“Both, I guess.”
“I think that if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”
“I don’t. I happen to think that the human will, backed by a sane mind can exercise some measure of control over events. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be in the racket I’m in.”
The Dream Master (1966)