43 quotes
Five days of wireheading alone should have killed her, never mind sudden cold turkey.
God Is An Iron (1977)
She was pretty enough to make a preacher kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Would he grow up to be Maker, Taker, or Faker?
Serpents’ Teeth (1981)
You humans are at least aware of that supreme paradox—that free will exists to an extent for the individual, but disappears in the group—although you can’t work with it.
It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?
God Is An Iron (1977)
Okay, I grant you the provisional status of human beings. Let’s deal.
Serpents’ Teeth (1981)
Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.
The Callahan Touch (1993)
Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed.
But one can be converted into the other.
God is an iron … If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.
God is an Iron (1977)
Next morning I decided that hangovers are like sex—the second time isn’t quite as painful. If the analogy held, by tomorrow I’d be enjoying it.
Lady Sally does not permit any kind of contempt here. Not even self-contempt. Maybe especially not self-contempt. Art with contempt in it is always sour.
Callahan's Lady (1989)
God is an iron… and that's a hot one.
God Is An Iron (1977)
It's always coldest before the warm.
Callahan's Key (2000)
Take it from your Aunt Maureen: if there is any way you can arrange your affairs so as to avoid dropping into whorehouse garbage from a great height, naked in February, then that is almost certainly the course your life should take.
Callahan's Lady (1989)
The Professor had come back from the Infinite. His eyes unrolled, his shoulders slumped slightly, and he acquired a wistful smile, as of one leaving Paradise to attend a sales convention in Columbus, Ohio.
Callahan's Lady (1989)
I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight was shocking.
God Is An Iron (1977)
Animated the face might have been beautiful — any set of features can support beauty — but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty.
God Is An Iron (1977)
Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure — which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior.
God Is An Iron (1977)
The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.
Lady Slings the Booze (1992)
I've tried it with men and women and boys and girls, in the dark and in the desert sun, with people I cared for and people I didn't give a damn about, and I have never understood the pleasure in it. The best it's ever been for me is not uncomfortable.
God Is An Iron (1977)