Fritz Leiber (1910 – 1992)
American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction.
I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!
The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes - so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell.
Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.
It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos—and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards!—masquerading as benign omniscient authority.
The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but—doubtless because they are afraid someone will some day raise the ever-unpleasant question of the true worth of things—they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk at and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale.
Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.
What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence - liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.
What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!
What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.
Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.
There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken.
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.
Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.
For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?
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.
Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.
They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say “planet” and “spaceship” to them, they still think “horoscope” and “flying saucer”.
Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.
The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.
In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it’s true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents.