Fritz Leiber

“He had the illusion, he said, of getting perilously close to the innermost secrets of the universe and finding they were rotten and evil and sardonic.”

“I’ll have to learn to snowshoe. I had my first lesson this morning and cut a ludicrous figure. I’ll be virtually a prisoner until I learn my way around. But any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!”

“There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.”

“That’s what everybody’s been looking for since the Year One—something a little more than sex.”

“There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren’t the worst.”

“I thought of how people are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distance barring them off from each other.”

“Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”

“To understand why George fell for this story, one must remember his stifled romanticism, his sense of personal failure, his deep need to believe. The thing came to him like, or rather instead of, a religious conversion.”

““You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess,” he assured her. “It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them.””

“Work and pray,It’s a lie!”

“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.”

“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 he was running not so much away from the cold and its crippling, supernatural horrors, as toward civilization, which was once again a bright emblem in his brain, an answer to all small-mindedness.”

“Sooner give a cobra a kiss, than a secret to a woman.”

“Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.”

“Afterward loses too many battles to Too Late.”

“I know, I know, the folk here are narrow-visioned, custom-bound. But matched with the twisted minds of civilization, they’re straight as pines.”

“Women are horrible. I mean, quite as horrible as men. Oh, is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?”

“Aye, we played at being mice, forgetting cats are real.”

“And I, well, in the month I’ve been here I’ve learned that the only way to survive in civilization is to abide by its unwritten rules—far more important than its laws chiseled in stone—and break them only at peril, in deepest secrecy, and taking all precautions.”

“For what is life but greed in action?”

“Fafhrd retorted, a little hotly, “Killing in fight isn’t murder.”Again the Mouser shrugged. “Killing is murder, no matter what nice names you give. Just as eating is devouring, and drinking guzzling.””

“Revenge is empty. It cannot bring back the dead.”

“We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.”

““Oaths are made to be kept only until their purpose be fulfilled,” the fluty voice responded. “Every geas is lifted at last, every self-set rule repealed. Otherwise orderliness in life becomes a limitation to growth; discipline, chains; integrity, bondage and evil-doing.””

“Thieves and astrologers moved restlessly in their sleep, sensing that the hours of night and work were drawing near.”

“Let fools seek it. They shall win it not. For although my treasure house be empty as air, no deadly creature in rocky lair, no sentinel outside anywhere, no pitfall, poison, trap, or snare, above and below the whole place bare, of demon or devil not a hair, no serpent lethal-fanged yet fair, no skull with mortal eye a-glare, yet have I left a guardian there. Let the wise read this riddle and forbear.”

“Unlike men, rubies and emeralds do not rest quietly in their graves.”

““What’s the use of knowing the name of a skull? One would never have occasion to talk of it,” said the fat thief loudly. “What interests me is that it has rubies for eyes.””

“Too much good luck was always dangerous.”

“They, like many priests, had been much too fanatical and not nearly as clever as the god they served.”

“Girls had a way of blotting out all lesser, but not thereby despicable, delights. Girls were for dessert.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Aye, there’s the bitter core of all freedom: no pay!”

“Bored and insecure men will loose arrows at dust motes.”

“Pulg, alongside his pink streak of sentimentality, had recently taken to sporting a gray one of superstition.”

“There would have been no insurmountable problem at all, of course, if Bwadres had only had that touch of realism about money matters that, when a true crisis arises, is almost invariably shown by even the fattest, greediest priest or the skinniest, most unworldly holy man.”

“I can see now that if I’d stayed I’d have gone the way of Pulg and all such Great Men—fat, power-racked, lieutenant-plagued, smothered with false-hearted dancing girls, and finally falling into the arms of religion. At least I’m saved that last chronic ailment, which is worse than the dropsy.”

“Know it or not, man treads between abysses a tightrope that has neither beginning nor end.”

“It was the laughter of the Elder Gods observing their creature man and noting their omissions, miscalculations and mistakes.”

“That is as far from the truth as I am from the Secret of the Sphinx.”

“It was more a patriotic than religious matter with Fafhrd. He believed in Odin only during moments of sentimental weakness.”

“They are in their fashion fearless, irreligiously considering themselves the coequals of destiny and having only contempt for the Demigoddess of Chance, the Imp of Luck, and the Demon of Improbability.”

“Eventually the tale came to an end, suddenly and seemingly in the middle, like a piece of foreign music.”

“He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.”

“Knowledge takes precedence over death.”

“The worst thing about mountain climbing is that the easy parts go so quickly.”

“Let never the gems of business be mixed with the jewels of pleasure.”

“He knew that sooner or later, in spite of all protecting charms and precautions, Death would creep silently on him or spring suddenly from some unguarded moment. This very night his horoscope might signal Death’s instant escapeless approach; and though men lived by lies, treating truth’s very self as lie to be exploited, the stars remained the stars.”

“With a happy roaring shout only he could hear, blood rushed through the Mouser’s arteries toward his center, reviving his limp manhood in a mere moment, as a magically summoned genie offhandedly builds a tower.”

“This was ecstacy indeed, he assured himself. It seemed to him that he was now in the Ninth and topmost Heaven, where a few select heroes luxuriate and dream and submit themselves to almost unendurable pleasures, at whiles glancing down with lazy amusement at all the gods toiling at their sparrow-watching and incense-sniffing and destiny-directing on the many tiers below.”

“When one achieves revenge, the innocent perforce suffer.”

“The more brilliant the enchanted male, the stupider the enchanting female.”

“Now it may be that in the world of Newhon there are gods of whom even Death does not know and who from time to time take pleasure in putting obstacles in his path. Or it may be that Chance is quite as great a power as Necessity.”

“For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart.”

““There are some things man was not meant to know,” the Mouser said in a most portentous voice. Then, swiftly switching to the familiar, “or rather, since I am in no way superstitious, there are some things that have not yet yielded to our philosophy.””

“And just think what rare delights—nay, what whole sets of ecstasies and blisses—this much gold would buy. How fortunate that metal was mindless slave of the man who held it!”

“Inconsiderate creatures, gods were.”

“That was another trouble with women, they were never there when you wanted or really needed them. They helped each other, all right, but they expected men to do all sorts of impossible feats of derring-do to prove themselves worthy of the great gift of their love (and what was that when you got down to it?—a fleeting clench-and-wriggle in the dark, illuminated only by the mute, incomprehensible perfection of a dainty breast, that left you bewildered and sad).”

“But oh, this lifelong servitude to girls—whimsical, innocent, calculating, icicle-eyed and hearted, fleeting, tripping little demons! White, slim-necked, sharp-toothed, restlessly bobbing weasels with the soulful eyes of lemurs!”

“Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?”

“Food for the hungry Isle. There was your real thinking man’s treasure, he told himself, beside which gold and twinkling jewels were merest trinkets, or the pointy breasts of young love or words of poets or the pointed stars themselves that astrologers cherished and that made men drunk with distance and expanse.”

“Women have power over men almost as great as gods do.”

“And the mighty are great worriers and spend much time preventing anything that troubles their peace of mind.”

““Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors,” the harbormaster answered him, “while truth plods on in sober garb.””

“Old legends said Death had a skinny sister denominated Pain, passionately devoted to the loathsome torture that often was Death’s prelude.”

“Great conquerors live on as their enemies’ devils.”

“Yes, indeed, he assured himself rapidly, things did seem to be working around to a grand payoff in the great game of trading heroic feats for intimate maidenly favors that all heroes lived or at least hoped by, no matter how disordered and irregular the bookkeeping.”

““You have been told that the Great God rules the universe—earth and sky. I tell you the Great God is fake!””

“But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!”

“No matter how hard and wearisome an age this might be, it was certainly a very exciting one with regard to manifestations of the supernatural.”

““Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it.“Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.””

“What is idealism? It is distortion. A giving of false values to things which in reality do not possess those values. Personalities differ chiefly in their pattern of values. When the values are largely false, the personality is unstable.”

“He knew that ahead lay many perils—threats to his bodily welfare. And recently Jarles had come to have a great respect for that bag of flesh and bones which contained his ego.”

“The idea of brutality actually shocks him, thought Goniface amusedly. I wonder what name he has for the toil we exact of the commoners, and the penances we impose on them?”

“I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy—unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!”

““Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.”“They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.””

“After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything.”

“Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse.”

“He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest With the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood.”

“Hey, am I dreaming?...Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line? The second question, though not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!”

“The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition.”

“They sat in small parties with a truculent quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere.”

“What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!”

“I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.”

“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.”

“Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.”

“Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.”

“Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears.”

“For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?”

“I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!”

“It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.”

“There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.”

“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”.”

“Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.”

“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 an omnipresent sense of crisis.”

“The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.”

“Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery.”

“You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.”

“It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.”

“I am up to date only sporadically. I live firmly in the world of art, where reality and fantasy are one.”

“I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence.”

“What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end.”

““You’ve got to believe there’s some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.”“All of us.””