The Door Into Summer Quotes

“I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured.
But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer. If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“I had taken a partner once before-but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“You can die anyplace. They’ve never managed to regulate that.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“But I gathered that it was classified...by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.” “Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“Be raped quietly, you mean.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“There is no time like the past to get things done.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“You can’t make an enemy by telling a mother her child is beautiful.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“If the word is ugly, the deed is ten times as ugly.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“Amazingly little real thought had been given to housework, even though it is at least 50 percent of all work in the world.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“But housewives were still complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had gone the way of the mastodon. I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen hours a day and eat table scraps at wages a plumber’s helper would scorn.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“I’ll say this for military research: If money and men can do it, it gets results. Print another billion, hire another thousand scientists and engineers, then in some incredible, left-handed, inefficient fashion the answers come up.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

“Only crooked gamblers claim to give the sucker the best of it, and insurance is legalized gambling.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer