Science Fiction Quote of the Week

Halvorsen leafed tiredly through the rest of the paper. He knew he wouldn't get a job, and if he did he wouldn't hold it. He knew it was a terrible thing to admit to yourself that you might starve to death because you were bored by anything except art, but he admitted it.

It had happened often enough in the past -- artists undergoing preposterous hardships, not, as people thought, because they were devoted to art, but because nothing else was interesting. If there were only some impressive, sonorous word that summed up the aching, oppressive futility that overcame him when he tried to get out of art -- only there wasn't.
--C. M. Kornbluth, “With These Hands”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

It was simply that, so often, evil could come of misguided good.
--Richard Matheson, “Mute”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

It all comes down to a question of sanity. What is sanity -- now, in the twentieth century, any time? Adherence to a norm. Conformity to certain basic conventions underlying all human conduct. In our age, departure from the norm has become the norm. Inability to conform has become the standard of conformity. That’s quite clear, isn’t it? And it enables you to understand, doesn’t it, your own case and that of your proteges? Over a long period of years you persisted in adhering to a norm, in conforming to certain basic conventions. You were completely unable to adapt yourself to the society around you. You could only pretend -- and your proteges wouldn’t have been able to do even that. Despite your many engaging personal characteristics, there was obviously only one course of action open to us.
--Phy in Fritz Leiber's “Sanity”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
--Ursula Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

I’m human. Do you think I’m not?
--Deirdre in C.L. Moore's “No Woman Born”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who -- who won the presidential election yesterday?"

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?"
--Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

We still do not understand what happened to Detroit.
--Murray Leinster, "Sideways in Time"

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

“Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”

“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!”
--Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

"It is my body, not yours," said Olava burning. "Or his. I have given it to my God. And I do not pass it out like little party cakes for the momentary satisfaction of those who happen to be around me. It is neither a sedative, palliative, reward, or bribe. It is my body."
--Richard Ben Sapir, The Far Arena

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

As for reform, or change, or originality of any kind, that’s always been the toughest proposition on earth. Even in bad times people hate the thought of changing anything, or reforming their ways.
--Aron in Edgar Pangborn's “The Freshman Angle”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

I know you’ve all laughed at the comic-book idea of some Martian monster lusting after beautiful white women. But has it ever occurred to you that a creature from outside might simply and honestly fall in love with you?
--Helen in Fritz Leiber's “The Ship Sails at Midnight”

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

All right you're a monomaniac. You're 40 and you've never married (and what a sweet damn fool you were to quarrel with Clarice over the candidates in 72) and you think your profession's taught you that politics means everything and so your party loses and it's the end of the world. But God damn it this time it is.
--Anthony Boucher, "The Other Inauguration"