The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II Quotes

“No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God

“The baby regarded Mike gravely as she discoursed to it about a poor drowned woofum-wuffums, and did the bad man treat it badly, then. The baby belched eloquently.
“He belches in English!” I remarked.
“Did it have the windy ripples?” cooed Mike. “Give us a kiss, honey lamb.”
The baby immediately flung its little arms around her neck and planted a whopper on her mouth.
“Wow!” said Mike when she got her breath. “Shorty, could you take lessons!”
“Lessons my eye,” I said jealously. “Mike, that’s no baby, that’s some old guy in his second childhood.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God

“His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn’t understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His short upper lip slanted sharply toward his tonsils, which had the effect of making his chinlessness positively jut.

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The bartender was fascinated by the way the teardrops proceeded down Biddiver’s amazing nose. One drop would dash almost halfway, and then hesitate, daunted by the hump. Then it would be joined by another teardrop, and the two, merging, would surmount the obstacle and slip down to hang glittering over the disappearing lip until a sob came along to shake them off.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God

“Sometimes I sets and thinks, and sometimes I just sets.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God: Volume II: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

“He couldn’t handle men. All his life he had run away from humans and what they represented to him. He was like a frightened child when men closed in on him.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“He had never graduated from any college or university because he found them too slow for him, and too rigid in their approach to education. He could not get used to the idea that perhaps his professors knew what they were talking about.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“What are we to do with Sturgeon’s frequently quoted assertion, “All my work is about love”? Well, I take the assertion seriously—but in the manner that I take seriously the innumerable strategies devised over the centuries by innumerable artists to reach into the centers of their own creativity. Such a statement may well represent Sturgeon’s own key to working. But there is no necessity for it to be my key into the work.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“Such a statement may well represent Sturgeon’s own key to working. But there is no necessity for it to be my key into the work.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“And though they clamor endlessly to ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” (a question I have never heard any SF writer worth her or his salt seriously try to answer), the question, “How do you put these ideas together?” (which, with a little thought and analysis, is sometimes answerable) is much rarer.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“Robert Heinlein may be responsible for more technical innovations, more rhetorical figures that have been absorbed into the particular practice of science fiction writing; his influence is certainly greater. But if this is so, it is at an extremely high cost, both ethically and aesthetically. (I use the terms in the same sense that allowed the young Ludwig Wittgenstein to jot in his notebook, on the 24th of July, 1916, almost two years before Sturgeon was born, “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same”—the very sense, I presume, that allowed the young Georg Lukacs to write, only a year before that, in his Theory of the Novel, that fiction is “the only art form in which the artist’s ethical position is the aesthetic problem.”)”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“Understand, I was a bright and profoundly unimaginative child: Much of what passes for intelligence in children is a stark deafness to metaphor coupled with a pigheaded literal-mindedness.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God

“Sometimes I sets and thinks, and sometimes I just sets.” The former is easy enough, and is what even an accomplished loafer has to go through before he reaches the latter and more blissful state. It takes years of practice to relax sufficiently to be able to “just set.” I’d learned it years ago. But”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God