Fritz Leiber (1910 – 1992)
American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction.
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”.
Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot.
The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence.
A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.
Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all.
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?
The Devourers want to brood about their great service to the many universes—it is their claim that servile customers make the most obedient subjects for the gods.
Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears.
There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.
It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.
I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.
Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.
There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.
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.
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.
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.
I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!
Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.
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.
For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?