Walter M. Miller Jr. > Quotes

“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“I'm not so sure he's mad, Father. Just a little devious in his sanity.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“We are the centuries... We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient impregnated) artifacts. We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do – Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and a traveling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries. Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb: (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.) Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens – and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! – an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr.

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Listen, my dear Cors, why don't you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn't allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Ask for an omen, then stone it when it comes -- de essentia hominum.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“It is said that water is for cattle and farmers, that milk is for children and blood for men.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“....Nature imposes nothing on you that Nature doesn't prepare you to bear.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was 'the last', the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His "I" was the converse of the imperial "We.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“One should be embarrassed to speak of God in the third person.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

“What's to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder's been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there's no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil. Was there any justification for what they did-or was there? We only know what that thing says, and that thing is a captive. The Asian radio has to say what will least displease it's government; ours has to say what will least displease our fine patriotic opinionated rabble, which is what, coincidentally, the government wants it to say anyhow, so where's the difference?”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Soon the sun will set'- is that prophecy? No, it's merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“...in divinity opposites are always reconciled.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

“When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye and, and the rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think- as long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Probing the womb of the future is bad for the child.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“He could think only of the girl and the child. He was certain she had been ready to change her mind, had needed only the command, I, a priest of God, adjure thee, and the grace to hear it--if only they had not forced him to stop where she could witness "God's priest" summarily overruled by "Caesar's traffic cop." Never to him had Christ's Kingship seemed more distant”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were there minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“... for no change comes calmly over the world...”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“There were spaceships again in that century, an dthe ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species that considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speechmakers.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Francis began the actual illumination of the lambskin. The intricacies of scrollwork and the excruciating delicacy of the gold-inlay work would, because of the brevity of his spare-project time, make it a labor of many years; but in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, finally Extreme Unction, and a moment of blackness at the end-or at the beginning, rather. For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. And then the King would say: “Come,” or the King would say: “Go,” and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed. It would be hard to believe differently during such an age as Francis knew.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“You heard him say it? 'Pain's the only evil I know about.' You heard that?"
The monk nodded solemnly.
"And that society is the only thing that determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?"
"Yes."
"Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. 'The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise and it would not obey.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The monk's ultimate goal is direct union with the Godhead. But to aim at that goal is to miss it altogether. His task is to rid himself of ego so that consciousness, once its usual discordant mental content is dumped out of it through ritual prayer and meditation, may experience nonself as a living formlessness and emptiness into which God may come, if it please Him to come.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

“When there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe. ”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction

“Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction

“Bless me Father, I ate a lizard." Brother Francis (Canticle for Leibowitz)”
― Walter M. Miller Jr.

“But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Simpletons! Yes, yes! I'm a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We'll build a town and we'll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they'll be dead! Simpletons! Let's go! This ought to show 'em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The Memorabilia, the abbey's small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and
soidisant
crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey's books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knightsfriars would have burned many of them as "heretical" according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The captain looked defensive. "You regard our customs as primitive?"

Every society to its own tastes, captain. The wisdom of one society would be folly for another. Who is qualified to judge? Only the universe, which passes the judgment of survival on all peoples.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction

“There seems to be at least one common denominator to all intelligent life: it was bipedal and bimannual. Four legs was the most practical number for any animal on any planet, and it seems that nature has nothing else to work with. When she decided to give intelligence to a species, she taught him to stand on his hind legs, freeing his forefeet to become tools of his intellect. And she usually taught him by making him use his hands to climb. As a Cophian biologist had said, "Life first tries to climb a tree to get to the stars. When it fails, it comes down and invents the high-C drive.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction

“For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age . . .”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“....to abuse the intellect for reasons of pride, vanity, or escape from responsibility, is the fruit of that same tree.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“You don't have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Tell me, how would you feel if everyone screamed and ran when they saw you coming, or hunted you down like a criminal? How long would you sanity last?"..."...Tell me something else, if all the world was blind save one man, wouldn't the world be inclined to call that man's sight a hallucination? And the man with eyes might even come to agree with the world.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction

“Dom Paulo had not expected to convince him. But it was with a heavy heart that the abbot noticed the plodding patience with which the thon heard him through; it was the patience of a man listening to an argument which he had long ago refuted to his own satisfaction.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Centuries old, but recently widened, the highway was the same road used by pagan armies, pilgrims, peasants, donkey carts, nomads, wild horsemen out of the east, artillery, tanks, and ten-ton trucks. Its traffic gushed or trickled or dripped, according to the age and season. Once before, long ago, there had been six lanes and robot traffic. Then the traffic had stopped, the paving had cracked, and sparse grass grew in the cracks after an occasional rain. Dust had covered it. Desert dwellers had dug up its broken concrete for the building of hovels and barricades. Erosion made it a desert trail, crossing wilderness. But now there were six lanes and robot traffic, as before.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Are you an atheist?"
"Oh no, I honor all the gods."
"And how many belong to that all?"
"Countless. And one."
"How meaningless!"
"'Oliness, let me hear you count to one."
"One."
"Point at that one."
Brownpony stirred restlessly. Finally he tapped his index finger against his temple.
Wooshin laughed quietly. "Wrong. You had to think about it too long. And you didn't count to one. You counted from one and stopped. The one is countless.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman