Fritz Leiber Quotes

All I know is a door into the dark

The future is hidden by a dark impenetrable veil, and yet we struggle to pierce through it.

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.

The world is a more mysterious place than we admit sometimes - there is more to the world than just human evil.

Oh, could we lift the future's sable shroud.

Destiny is always dark.

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me.

Interesting things happen in the dark . . . sometimes.

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.

Beyond is all abyss, eternity, whose end no eye can reach.

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries--the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which thequickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature's works.

What is the future? What is the past? What are we? What is the magic fluid that surrounds us and conceals the things we most need to know? We live and die in the midst of marvels.

When we believe we have all the answers, we are not open to mystery. To begin a mystical journey, you have to start with a sense of wonder, of not knowing where you are going or how you will travel. The initial phase of alchemy is called the nigredo-it's the phase of darkness, when it's "blacker than black." You feel this when you start something new-go off to college, start a new job, travel to a foreign land, or end a relationship that is not working.

Silence is like nightfall. Objects are lost in it insensibly.

We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

I look up, and stop breathing. Eyes glitter in the darkness. Dark shapes sit in the car, more numerous than we are. The factionless.

Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just! Shining nowhere but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, Could man outlook that mark!

I like the idea of being sort of withdrawn and mysterious, and what can be more mysterious that someone wearing a trash bag, like a dark trash bag, with eye holes that say "nihilism?" You'd be curious. What's underneath that? Is it perfect? Or is it broken?

We fear that which we cannot see.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.