The Best of R.A. Lafferty Quotes

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,’ said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“(We haven’t the exact citation of this. It’s from Charles Fort or from one of his imitators.) It’s of a scientist who refused to believe that several pieces of limestone had fallen from the sky, even though two farmers had seen them fall. They could not have fallen from the sky, the scientist said, because there is no limestone in the sky. (What would that scientist have done if he had been confronted with the question of Whales in the Sky?)”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“Ah yes, Mrs. Rampart. And what is the name of the youngest boy here?” Charley Dublin asked. “Fatty,” said Fatty Rampart. “But surely that is not your given name?” “Audifax,” said five-year-old Fatty. “Ah well, Audifax, Fatty, are you a kidder too?” “He’s getting better at it, Mr. Dublin,” Mary Mabel said. “He was a twin till last week. His twin was named Skinny. Mama left Skinny unguarded while she was out tippling, and there were wild dogs in the neighborhood. When Mama got back, do you know what was left of Skinny? Two neck bones and an ankle bone. That was all.” “Poor Skinny,” Dublin said.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“But a lot of people have written modern-day tall tales and not one of them has come close to writing like the Bard of Tulsa. Consider such digressions as Clarence Little-Saddle’s riff on the significance of the war bonnet and the lecture on how much larger the moon appears at the horizon than overhead. Consider his beautiful use of dialect. Consider his lovely comic asides and delightful parodies of scientific argot. Tall tales are nothing if not straightforward. “Narrow Valley” is anything but. This is a sophisticated work, written by a sophisticated man.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“Half a century went by. Clarence Big-Saddle called his son. ‘I’ve had it, boy,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll just go in the house and die.’ ‘OK, Dad,’ the son Clarence Little-Saddle said. ‘I’m going in to town to shoot a few games of pool with the boys. I’ll bury you when I get back this evening.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Best of R. A. Lafferty