FRITZ LEIBER

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

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse.

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.

We're free out here, really free for the first time. We're floating, literally. Gravity can't bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it's only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it's the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream.

A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.

Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know.

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

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

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

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.

Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power.... It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled ones.

We're free out here, really free for the first time. We're floating, literally. Gravity can't bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it's only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it's the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream.

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

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

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 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?

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 was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.

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.

A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.

Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse.

I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!