Fritz Leiber Quotes & Sayings

I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help. — Fritz Leiber

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried. — Fritz Leiber

I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat? — Fritz Leiber

Still - " Tigerishka temporized - "are things I will tell." Then, at court-stenographer speed, and a little singsong, as if it were very boring to her: "I come superior galactic culture. Read minds, throw thoughts, sail hyperspace, live forever if want, blow up suns - all that sort stuff. Look like animal - resume ancestral shapes. Make brains small but really huge - (psychophysiosubmicrominiaturization! We stay superior.) You not believe? So listen. Plants eat inorganic: they superior! Animals eat plants: they superior. Cats eat fresh meat: we most superior! Monkeys try eat everything: a mess!" Then without pause: "Wanderer sail hyperspace. Yes, star photos, I know. Need fuel - much matter for converters. Your moon good woodpile. Smash, pulverize, dredge. We fuel up, then go. No need you monkeys get hot and bothered. — Fritz Leiber

Fafhrd stopped, again wiped right hand on robe, and held it out. "Name's Fafhrd. Ef ay ef aitch ar dee."
Again the Mouser shook it. "Gray Mouser," he said a touch defiantly, as if challenging anyone to laugh at the sobriquet. "Excuse me, but how exactly do you pronounce that? Faf-hrud?"
"Just Faf-erd. — Fritz Leiber

Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance - which their power protected. — Fritz Leiber

Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them. — Fritz Leiber

Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. — Fritz Leiber

We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness. — Fritz Leiber

Do you think the saucer actually had an inertialess drive - like E. E. Smith's bergenholms or something?" Harry McHeath asked Doc. "Have to, I'd think, the way it was jumping around. In a situation like this, science fiction is our only guide. On the other hand - — Fritz Leiber

From all around came very faintly a low sad hum, as the unhoused bees mourned. — Fritz Leiber

Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse. — Fritz Leiber

Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know. — Fritz Leiber

There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky. — Fritz Leiber

Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find. — Fritz Leiber

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter ... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever. — Fritz Leiber

What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers, and everything else worthwhile. And that's as true for the last man as the first. — Fritz Leiber

We're free out here, really free for the first time. We're floating, literally. Gravity can't bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it's only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it's the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream. — Fritz Leiber

Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Heren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsalus Niger". — Fritz Leiber

After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. — Fritz Leiber

There we were, a small bunch of rather bright and fortunate young people, thinking ourselves somehow special and exceptional, but really very naive. — Fritz Leiber

Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead. — Fritz Leiber

Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though knowing them almost certainly to be such. — Fritz Leiber

Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself. — Fritz Leiber

Oh, Ivivis, sorcerers don't have mothers! — Fritz Leiber

Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world. — Fritz Leiber

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset? — Fritz Leiber

If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat. — Fritz Leiber

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis. — Fritz Leiber

There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood. — Fritz Leiber

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards. — Fritz Leiber

Girls are for dessert. — Fritz Leiber

What is superstition , but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb. — Fritz Leiber

He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows. — Fritz Leiber

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love. — Fritz Leiber

A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in black cone-hat and robe of stars, — Fritz Leiber

A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences. — Fritz Leiber

The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That's why they're the gods! I told you they were devils. — Fritz Leiber

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost") — Fritz Leiber

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other. — Fritz Leiber

I abominate any organization that denies cats are people! — Fritz Leiber

It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost") — Fritz Leiber

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude. — Fritz Leiber

That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things as they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going to shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted yourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live the intervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail. — Fritz Leiber

Certainly we've made important innovations, chief among them the systematic use of the scientific method," he said at one point, "but the primitive groundwork is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We're modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could you expect us to be? — Fritz Leiber

The Mouser sighed. The moment had come, he knew, as it always did, when outward circumstances and inner urges commanded an act, when curiosity and fascination tipped the scale of caution, when the lure of a vision and an adventure became so great and deep-hooking that he must respond to it or have his inmost self-respect eaten away. — Fritz Leiber

Of course it had been an hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, with a score of coincidences to back them up, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way
No, more than that. When you must keep faith with someone you love. — Fritz Leiber

Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours. — Fritz Leiber

At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites - milky ovals infinitely eerie in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips. — Fritz Leiber

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright. — Fritz Leiber

Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power ... It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled ones ... — Fritz Leiber