I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream Quotes

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet ... AM has won, simply ... he has taken his revenge ...

I have no mouth. And I must scream.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“I am ... cogito ergo sum ... I think, therefore I am.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“And we passed through the cavern of rats.

And we passed through the path of boiling steam.

And we passed through the country of the blind.

And we passed through the slough of despond.

And we passed through the vale of tears.

And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM
said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“I have no mouth. And I must scream...”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter. He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you're there, aren't you.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“I mean, what do you do, when you find that things are not what you were taught they’re supposed to be? What do you do with the desperation that boils up from your stomach when you know there’s a road out there with your destination at the end of it, but it’s too damned dark to even find the road? You turn and turn and turn around like a dog trying to escape. Shrieks in the cavity of your head that so urgently needs to be filled with facts and challenges.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you. The”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“No, Father. I lack for nothing. I have my meal cakes and my ale. I have my shadows and my colors. And there is the smell of time passing. I need nothing more.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’” The”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“Or, as Goethe summed it: “Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, Which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I don't doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling! Stories that will make Dr Shedd sniff the air and make Lester smile as je thinks, "The kid's coming along all right.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the pock marks he had created in one hundred and nine years.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear: If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“Glowing in the dimensionless whispering dimness, Griffin saw a scene that could only have come from his dreams. The girl, naked white against the ledges and slopes of the falls, water cascading down her back, across her thighs, cool against her belly, her head laid back and white water bubbling through the shining black veil of her hair, touching each strand, silkily shining it with moisture; her eyes closed in simple pleasure; that face, the right face, the special face, the certain face of the woman he had always looked for without looking, hunted silently for, without acknowledging the search; lusted for, without feeling worthy of the hunger.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak soft creatures”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“Ashamed apologies and a gentle thank you. I do not digress.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“A moment out of time .lights whirling and spinning in a cotton candy universe .down a bottomless funnel roundly sectioned like a goat' s horn .a cornucopia that rose up cuculiform smooth and slick as a worm belly .endless nights that pealed ebony funeral bells .out of fog .out of weightlessness .suddenly total cellular knowledge .memory running backward .gibbering spastic blindness .a soundless owl of frenzy trapped in a cave of prisms .sand endlessly draining down .billows of forever .edges of the world as they splintered .foam rising drowning from inside .the smell of rust .rough green corners that burn .memory the gibbering spastic blind memory .seven rushing vacuums of nothing .yellow .pinpoints cast in amber straining and elongating running like live wax .chill fevers .overhead the odour of stop .this is the stopover before hell or heaven .this is limbo .trapped and doomed alone in a mist-eaten nowhere .a soundless screaming a soundless whirring a soundless spinning spinning spinning .spinning .spinning .spinning .spinning”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“Because, friends and neighbors, we live in a Time of Beautiful People. Gorgeous is revered. We can’t stand anything even remotely ordinary; it has to be young and lovely. So you are not where it’s at, if you aren’t pretty. The trend is up, and it’s getting worse. We spend billions more on cosmetics each year than education, and if it continues to spiral, soon enough we will come to a time when we may contemplate”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“i loooveee ted i loove ted s much he is soooo hot”
― harlan ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“First there was light, and then there was no-light. First there was heat, and then there was no-heat. And — First there was love, and then there was no-love. But in its place did not come the absence of love, the emptiness that the going of light and heat had left. Another moved in to take its place. In its place came hate.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream