25 quotes found
“after all, what is a planet but an island in space?”
“…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?”
“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.”
“We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.”
“Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.”
“Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that.Exactly, she agreed.”
“But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can ma...”
“It seemed to me an odd view to take - rather as if one should protest that one didn't LIKE the idea of dying or being born. I preferred the notion of finding out first how it would be, and then doi...”
“But he survived, that radio announcer. His ship and five others out of the flotilla of ten came through, a bit radioactive, but otherwise unharmed. And I understand that the first thing that happen...”
“What do you think it is that makes a man"I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words."It is not!" he said. "A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't...”
“We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.”
“Darling, whose book is this to be?""Ostensibly yours, my sweet""I see -- rather like my life since I met you?""Yes darling”
“We are explorers. We are at present, as far as we know, the only explorers of the universe. For a long time we thought that ours was the only planet that could support life. Then we found others th...”
“I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the info...”
“You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scar...”
“Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negativean absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which...”
“To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. Bu...”
“The way I came to miss the end of the world well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.”
“I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair ge...”
“But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, w...”
“It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”
“What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes”
