The Rediscovery of Man Quotes

“We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“Joan commented, upon sentence, "My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“... but remember that I shall love your sorrow...”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“... crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“Love is not proud. Love has no real name. Love is for life itself, and we have life.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium—metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of Old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the burn and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an air-carried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Chang nodded sagely. “My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up-and-out, and what we did there, but it did not matter. He said, ‘Airplanes were good enough for Confucius, and they are for me too.’ The old humbug!”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Meeya Meefla, where”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“She looked at the eyes themselves. They had stayed open for forty years, in the blackness near to pitch-darkness of the tiny cabin. The dim dials had shone like blazing suns upon his tired retinas before he was able to turn his eyes away. From time to time he had looked out at the black nothing to see the silhouettes of his sails, almost-blackness against total blackness, as the miles of their sweep sucked up the push of light itself and accelerated him and his frozen cargo at almost immeasurable speeds across an ocean of unfathomable silence. Yet, what he had done, she had asked to do.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“She saw in him a young bachelor, prematurely old, a man whose love had been given to emptiness and horror, not to the tangible rewards and disappointments of human life. He had had all space for his mistress, and space had used him harshly. Still young, he was old; already old, he was young.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“she knew full well that people carry their secret biographies written in the muscles of their faces, and that a stranger passing on the street tells us (whether he wishes to or not) all his inmost intimacies. If we but look sharply enough, and in the right light, we know whether fear or hope or amusement has tallied the hours of his days, we divine the sources and outcome of his most secret sensuous pleasures, we catch the dim but persistent reflections of those other people who have left the imprints of their personalities on him in turn.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“the most ancient prerogative of law was the monopoly of death. Even the ancient nations, in the times of the Wars, before the Beasts, before men went into the up-and-out—even the ancients had known this. How did they say it? Only the state shall kill. The states were gone but the Instrumentality remained, and the Instrumentality could not pardon things which occurred within the Earths but beyond its authority.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“practiced with soundtracks. Funny you noticed it. I think I am the only scanner in or between the Earths who can pass for an ordinary man. Mirrors and soundtracks. I found out how to act.” “But you don’t…?” “No. I don’t feel, or taste, or hear, or smell things, any more than you do. Talking doesn’t do me much good. But I notice that it cheers up the people around me.” “It would make a difference in the life of Luci.” Chang nodded sagely. “My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for “love,” “duty” “humanity” and “virtue”—words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“So what you face is a month of being absolutely wide awake, on an operating table and being operated on without anesthetic, while doing some of the hardest work that mankind has ever found.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human. “I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age,” he murmured, but the voice was weak and the robots did not hear him.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Was that what people learned between the stars? To care for other people very much indeed and to spring upon them only to reveal love and not devouring to their prey?”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“At sixteen Helen was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“There is no all-​purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty pounds. You do.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith - Cordwainer Smith