From RAH’s “Our Fair City,” which I don’t have on me, which is a real shame because the quote’s even better if you have the whole conversation. Also, I probably screwed up.
“Don’t worry, it’s not a real camera. We’re peddling grass, this is just the hay mow.”
“Here is wisdom for the ages: Men rule. Women decide.” Heinlein, but I’m not sure if it’s from Time Enough for Love or Number of the Beast.
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life–they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
This is from
The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe.
Kat
October 18, 2004, 2:32am
25
Yes, of course, Shan thought. The situation had only lacked eight foot turtles. --from I Dare , by Sharon Lee and Steven Miller.
Sampiro
October 18, 2004, 3:31am
26
*I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and
Trafalmadorian to Billy Pilgrim, Slaughterhouse Five , Kurt Vonnegut
There are quotes, and then there are quotes. These are the latter.
`Britt pushed her capri pants down over her sweeping hips. After peeling off her long, shapely legs, she straightened and stretched her nude body luxuriously.’ (Adam Coulter, Debauchee, 1963)
`The casket was a cube. It was about a meter and a half long, a half-meter wide, another half-meter deep.’ (Robert Wells, Spacejacks, 1975)
`A minute later, he was vomiting up the breakfast he had not eaten.’ (Peter Straub, Lost Boy Lost Girl, 2003)
`If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to a vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.’ (Michael Crichton, Prey, 2002)
`When he was yet a million miles away the bright ring of fire that marked its portal filled the sky in front of him, flexing and twisting like the devil’s anus in spasms of immortal agony.’ (Alan Glasser, The Demon Cosmos, 1978)
We came to your world as fugitives from a great planet that once formed part of the solar system -- a planet composed entirely of ultra-violet substances ...' (Clark Ashton Smith, The Invisible City’, 1932)
I could go on for days, I tell you, days.
Or I could just refer you to the dread page of Fanthorpisms .
“I’m am idiot,” he said. “I am the primaeval ancestor of all idiots. I am an arch-crud. I am the nig-nog of all the nig-nogs. I am the ultimate splurge!”
Dan was the kind of man to whom panic and fear were as alien and foreign as green spotted pseudopods.
Like the secret police of George Orwell’s “1984,” the beavers were literally everywhere.
No, truly, I cannot go on.