The Man Who Fell to Earth Quotes

“The strange thing about television is that it doesn't tell you everything.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“Not all of us are insane.’ ‘But most of you are. Enough of you are – it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.”
― Walter Tevis, The man who fell to Earth

“Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“everywhere alone.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“He began to see a kind of beauty in the strangeness of the field, too. It was quite different from what he had been taught to expect —as he had already discovered, were many of the things in this world—yet there weas pleasure for him now in its alien colors and textures, its new sights and smells. In sounds, too; for his ears were very acute and he heard many strange and pleasant noises in the grass, the diverse rubbings and clickings of those insects that had survived the cold weather of early November; and even, with his head now against the ground, the very small, subtle murmurings in the earth itself.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“The house was an immense place, isolated in a great wooded area. The building and the trees seemed wet, glistening dimly in the grey morning light that was much like the light of midday of Anthea. It was refreshing to his over-sensitive eyes. He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people.....”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“Did they ruin your mind when they ruined your eyes, Mr Newton?’ Newton”
― Walter Tevis, The man who fell to Earth

“He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“He was sick, sick from the long dangerous trip he had taken, sick from all the medicine —the pills, the inoculations, the inhaled gases — sick from worry, the anticipation of crisis, and terribly sick from the awful burden of his own weight. He had known for years that when the time came, when he would finally land and begin to effect that complex, long-prepared plan, he would feel something like this. The place, however much he had studied it, however much he had rehearsed his part in it, was so incredibly alien — the feeling, now the he could feel — the feeling was overpowering. He lay down in the grass and became very sick.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“and I live alone everywhere. Altogether”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“little and ran away if a girl tried to touch him. Or maybe he was queer—anybody who sat around reading all the time and looked like he did… But he didn’t talk like a queer.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“Doesn't mankind have a right to choose its own form of destruction?”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“He did not become drunk in quite the same way that the humans did; or at least he thought he did not. He never wished to become unconscious, or riotously happy, or godlike; he only wanted relief, and he was not certain from what.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“Trolls live in caves. Elves live everywhere. Elves have the power of adapting themselves to extraordinarily difficult environments, such as this one.” He waved a shaky hand out toward the lake, spilling gin on his shirt. “I am an elf, Doctor Bryce, and I live alone everywhere. Altogether everywhere alone.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“But when he was a mile from the town, walking through a barren field, toward the low hills where his camp was, all of it suddenly came over him in one crushing shock—the strangeness of it, the danger, the pain and worry in his body—and he fell to the ground and lay there, his body and his mind crying out against the violence that was being done to them by this most foreign, most strange and alien of all places.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“He began to feel what he had sometimes felt before; a heavy lassitude, a world-weariness, a profound fatigue with this busy, busy, destructive world and all its chittering noises. He felt as though he could give the whole thing up, that it was foolish, impossibly foolish to have started it, more than twenty years before. He looked around him again, tiredly. What was he doing here—here on this other world, third from the sun, a hundred million miles from his home?”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“But, damn it, you’re not gods.”
“No. But have your gods ever saved you before?”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“Was Newton, also a master of quiet morning drunkenness, looking for - for whatever it was that could supply a sane man in an insane world a reason for not being drunk in the morning?”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“The man was very odd. Tall, thin, with white hair and a fine, delicate bone structure. He had smooth skin and a boyish face — but the eyes were very strange, as though they were weak, over-sensitive, yet with a look that was old and wise and tired.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“How human he had become, to rationalize that way! He blamed her for his going native and becoming obsessed with vague guilts and vaguer doubts. She had taught him to drink gin; and she had shown him an aspect of strong and comfortable and hedonistic and unthinking humanity that his fifteen years of studying television had left him unaware of.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“He was not at all certain that these people had been entirely wise in their development of that strange manifestation of theirs, a thing Anthea was totally without—and yet which the Antheans, in their ancient visits to the planet, were probably to blame for—this peculiar set of premises and promises called religion. He did not understand it very well, however. Antheans believed, to be sure, that there probably were gods in the universe, or creatures that might be called gods, but this was not a thing of any great importance to them, any more than it really was to most humans, Yet the old human belief in sin and redemption was meaningful to him and, he, like all Antheans, was quite familiar with the sense of guilt and the need for its expiation. Yet now the humans seemed to be building loose constructions of half-belief and sentiment to replace their religions, and he did not know what to make of it; he could not really fathom why Betty Jo was so much concerned over the supposed strength she received in weekly doses from her synthetic church, a form of strength that seemed less certain and more troublesome than that she received from her gin.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“the man speaking was the President of the United States, and he was speaking the bombast of the hopeless.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“littered with atomic rubble, the burnt-out residue of apelike wrath.”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth