Fritz Leiber (1910 – 1992)
American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction.
Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.
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.
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.
Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.
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.
What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!
What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence - liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.
Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.
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.
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.
Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.
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.