Dark Benediction Quotes

“If Frank were to see me like this,” she thought, “he would put me to bed with a couple of sleeping pills, and call that smug Dr. Mensley to have a look at my mind. And Dr. Mensley would check my ambivalences and my repressions and my narcissistic, voyeuristic, masochistic impulses. He would tighten my screws and readjust me to reality, fit me into a comfortable groove, and take the pale beast out of me to make me a talking doll.”
― 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

“she”
― 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

“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

“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

“Lucey had been younger then—younger and wilder, and not afraid of shame.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Dark Benediction

“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