Steve > Steve's Quotes

“I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only
me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back
through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for
liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring
you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping
about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and
evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy,
some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he
doesn’t exist, really.
These last few days I’ve felt Godless. I’ve felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a
God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God.
Prayer and worship and singing hymns—all silly and useless.
I’m trying to explain why I’m breaking with my principles (about never committing violence). It is
still my principle, but I see you have to break principles sometimes to survive. It’s no good trusting
vaguely in your luck, in Providence or God’s being kind to you. You have to act and fight for
yourself.
The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.
As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It’s
obvious, it stares you in the face. There must be a God and he can’t know anything about us.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“With means, if more than a little diminished means, of his own Ethan had done what his father before him, likewise a lawyer, had done, and had once in days past counselled him to do before it was too late, before this might spell an irrevocable retirement. He made a Retreat. (To be sure he had not been bidden so far afield as had his father, who’d spent the last year of peace before the First World War as a legal adviser on international cotton law in Czarist Russia, whence he brought back to his young son in Wales, or so he announced, lifting it whole out of a mysterious deep-Christmas-smelling wooden box, a beautiful toy model of Moscow; a city of tiny magical gold domes, pumpkin- or Christmas-bell-shaped, sparkling with Christmas tinsel-scented snow, bright as new silver half-crowns, and of minuscule Byzantine chimes; and at whose miniature frozen street corners waited minute sleighs, in which Ethan had imagined years later lilliputian Tchitchikovs brooding, or corners where lurked snow-bound Raskolnikovs, their hands stayed from murder evermore: much later still he was to become unsure whether the city, sprouting with snow-freaked onions after all, was intended to be Moscow or St. Petersburg, for part of it seemed in memory built on little piles in the water, like Eridanus; the city coming out of the box he was certain was magic too—for he had never seen it again after that evening of his father’s return, in a strange astrakhan-collared coat and Russian fur cap—the box that was always to be associated also with his mother’s death, which had occurred shortly thereafter; the magic bulbar city going back into the magic scented box forever, and himself too afraid of his father to ask him about it later—though how beautiful for years to him was the word city, the carilloning word city in the Christmas hymn, Once in Royal David’s City, and the tumultuous angel-winged city that was Bunyan’s celestial city; beautiful, that was, until he saw a city—it was London—for the first time, sullen, in fog, and bloodshot as if with the fires of hell, and he had never to this day seen Moscow—so that while this remained in his memory as nearly the only kind action he could recall on the part of either of his parents, if not nearly the only happy memory of his entire childhood, he was constrained to believe the gift had actually been intended for someone else, probably for the son of one of his father’s clients: no, to be sure he hadn’t wandered as far afield as Moscow; nor had he, like his younger brother Gwyn, wanting to go to Newfoundland, set out, because he couldn’t find another ship, recklessly for Archangel; he had not gone into the desert nor to sea himself again or entered a monastery, and moreover he’d taken his wife with him; but retreat it was just the same.)”
― Malcolm Lowry, October Ferry to Gabriola

“The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.”
― C.M. Kornbluth, The Marching Morons

“Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose.
A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky. Syme felt a
simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that he had walked so near London. He walked by instinct along one white
road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan. In the Tretyakov Gallery he had fallen in love with a recumbent statue, and at the Moscow Ballet School with an entire roomful of girls. Entering the room, he had been struck by the aroma, tenderly acrid, of young female sweat. Sixteen and seventeen, wearing patchy practice suits, the girls were twirling so strenuously their slippers were unraveling. Demure student faces crowned the unconscious insolence of their bodies. The room was doubled in depth by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Bech was seated on a bench at its base. Staring above his head, each girl watched herself with frowning eyes frozen, for an instant in the turn, by the imperious delay and snap of her head. Bech tried to remember the lines of Rilke that expressed it, this snap and delay:
did not the drawing remain/that the dark stroke of your eyebrow/swiftly wrote on the wall of its own turning?
At one point the teacher, a shapeless old Ukrainian lady with gold canines, a prima of the thirties, had arisen and cried something translated to Bech as, “No, no, the arms free, free!”
And in demonstration she had executed a rapid series of pirouettes with such proud effortlessness that all the girls, standing this way and that like deer along the wall, had applauded. Bech had loved them for that. In all his loves, there was an urge to rescue—to rescue the girls from the slavery of their exertions, the statue from the cold grip of its own marble, the embassy wife from her boring and unctuous husband, the chanteuse from her nightly humiliation (she could not sing), the Mongolian from her stolid race. But the Bulgarian poetess presented herself to him as needing nothing, as being complete, poised, satisfied, achieved. He was aroused and curious and, the next day, inquired about her of the man with the vaguely contemptuous mouth of a hare—a novelist turned playwright and scenarist, who accompanied him to the Rila Monastery. “She lives to write,” the playwright said. “I do not think it is healthy.”
― John Updike, Bech: A Book

“Blockade (1938)

Marco: [last lines, after being told to find peace]

Marco: Peace? Where can you find it? Our country's been turned into a battlefield! There's no safety for old people and children. Women can't keep their families safe in their houses; they can't be safe in their own fields! Churches, schools, hospitals are targets! It's not war; war is between soldiers! It's murder! Murder of innocent people! There's no sense to it. The world can stop it! Where's the conscience of the world?”
― Film "Blockade" 1938

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine

“Oh-oh-oh-oh
Other flamingos than me”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“There had been "fun ones." Like the afternoon that Gorwing had come roaring and snapping into his place, just as urgently as he had tonight, demanding to know if G-Note had a copy of Trials and Triumphs, My Forty Years in the Show Business, by P. T. Barnum; and G-Note had! And they had tumbled it, with a lot of other old books, into two boxes, and had driven out to the end of Carrio Lane, where Gorwing knew there was somebody who needed the book - not who, not why, just that there was somebody who needed it - and he and G-Note had stood at opposite sides of the lane, each with a box of books, and had bellowed at each other, "You got the P. T. Barnum book over there?" and "I don't know if I have the P. T. Barnum book here; have you got the P. T. Barnum book there?" and "What is the name of the P. T. Barnum book?" and "Trials and Triumphs, My Forty Years in the Show Business," and so on, until, sure enough, a window popped open and a lady called down, "Do one of you men really have Barnum's biography there?" and, when they said they had, she said it was a miracle; and she came down and gave them fifteen dollars for it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Beyond

“No mean Machiavelli is smiling, cynical Sidney Kidd.”
― Philip Barry, The Philadelphia Story: A Comedy in Three Acts

“For instance, 'the beer is never clear near here, dear' is unfortunate, even as assonance.”
― T. H. White , The Once and Future King

“This was one of their love poems:

Mo Rog
Glonog,
Quinba,
Hlin varr.

It meant: "Give me a kiss, please, Miss. I like your nose."

From Mistress Masham's Repose ”
― T. H. White

“Half a mile from Haverstraw there lived a halfwit fellow,
Half his house was brick and red, and half was wood and yellow;
Half the town knew half his name but only half could spell it.
If you will sit for half an hour, I’ve half a mind to tell it.”
― James Thurber, Lanterns & Lances

“When, in a free society, the press is criticized for negativity, that almost always means it has dared to question the policies of the party in power. 'Patriotism,' Samuel Johnson said, 'is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' He could have been speaking of those who use it to shield themselves from dissent.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II

“The older you get, the less afraid of ghosts you are - whether you believe in them or not. By the time you pass the fifty mark you've known so many people who are now dead that ghosts, if there are any, aren't all strangers. Some of your best friends are ghosts; why should you be afraid of them? And it's not too many years before you'll all be on the other side of the fence yourself.”
― Fredric Brown, Night of the Jabberwock

“I didn't notice I was crying until a stewardess came by and gave me a tissue to blow my nose in. Her arm and wrist were slender and they formed a pretty arch, like the limb of a fruit tree, as she poked the tissue into my clenched fist. She didn't look at my eyes. It was a perfect gesture, an expression of indifference and concern, which is the most a drunk can ask for.”
― John Straley, The Woman Who Married a Bear

“But neither Bartholomew Cubbins, nor King Derwin himself, nor anyone else in the Kingdom of Didd could ever explain how the strange thing happened. They could only say it just "happened to happen" and was not very likely to happen again.”
― Dr. Seuss, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins

“After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in swarms. Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a story. They were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the labor of inventing a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the famous Health Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It was set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but as the twins’ voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an effect all its own:
Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf? You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself, To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your health.
Then we’ll all go marching on.
A healthy mind in A clean body, A healthy mind in A clean body, A healthy mind in A clean body, The slogan for one and all.
As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently at the Congregational Festival, one of their father’s minor lyrics:
What does little birdie say On the sill at break o’ day? “Hurrah for health in Nautilus For Pa and Ma and all of us, Hurray, hurray, hurray!”
― Sinclair Lewis

“De Gaulle can greet Mendès-France with mingled amusement and affection—"Ah, Mendès, you have come to tell me you are torn"—but in America it is two strikes and you're out, Adlai, particularly when otherwise alienated intellectuals are so eager to embrace the cult of experience and to worship men of action.”
― Anonymous

“Nize baby, et op all de screenplay.”
― Budd Schulberg, The Disenchanted

“You're a taffy-puller."

"I'm a what?"

"A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn't you ever see one?

" I don't think so," she breathed. " But - "

" You see them on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the 'handle' of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one `handle' and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again." Robin's eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. "Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn't a speck of taffy on it, not a drop, not a smidgen. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished cam rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of thar fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and squashed flat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they're being mauled around the way the bubbles were." He sighed. "There's almost too much contrast - that competent, beautiful machinist's dream handling - what? Taffy - no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I'd feel better if the machine handled one of Dali's limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn't matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You're a taffy-puller. You've never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Maturity: Three stories

“Higgledy-piggledy,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
High over Jutland flew
In from the East.
'Well,' quipped a Minister
Plenipotentiary,
'Something is Groton in
Denmark, at least.”
― Anthony Hecht, Jiggery Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, With a New Epilogue

“There is only so much one can do for the dead without joining them.

The Caravan from Troon”
― Kage Baker, Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2001

“It is as though the moon changed every thing -
Myself and all that I can hear and see;
For when the heavy body has grown weak,
There is nothing that can tether the wild mind
That, being moonstruck and fantastical,
Goes where it fancies.


From The King's Threshold”
― William Butler Yeats

“I read this book a few decades ago, on a trip to some of the territories of the old Byzantine Empire, during which an emotional relationship came to an emotionally draining end, so it may retain some of the hectic inanity of my personal life, but great works are fractal, reflecting both our grand ambitions and our petty failures.

------------From a review on Goodreads”
― Alexander Jablokov

“When I was young,' I say, beginning with the most painful words an old man knows.”
― Alexander Jablokov, The Breath of Suspension

“Tracy stood up and found that the room was swaying around him in a manner that would have been more disconcerting if it had been less familiar.”
― Fredric Brown

“It's hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It's hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you're exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you're swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.

Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it's easy to forget that you - and your trauma - are not the only thing on anybody else's mind, or even the most important one, because they're all really busy thinking about their own shovels.

----------"Erase, Erase, Erase" / The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October, 2019”
― Elizabeth Bear

“Darius was clearly of the opinion

that the air was also man's dominion.

And that with paddle or fin or pinion

we soon or late shall navigate

the azure, as now we sail the sea.

The thing looks simple enough to me.

And if you doubt it,

see how Darius reasoned about it.

"The birds can fly, an why can't I?

Must we give in?" says he with a grin,

"that the Blue bird and Feeby

Are smarter than we be?"


"Just fold our hands and see the Swalla,

and the Black bird and the Cat bird beat us holla?

Or tell me that chatterin' sassy little wren knows more 'en men?

Just show me that. Or prove that the bat

has got more brains than's in my hat,

an' I'll back down. An' not till then.”


From "Darius Green and His Flying Machine”
― John T. Trowbridge