Jack Finney Quotes & Sayings

Would you have references?"
"I'm awfully sorry but I haven't. I just arrived in New York, and don't know a soul. Except you." I smiled but she didn't smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, "It's true that I'm an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I'm neat. — Jack Finney

But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope. — Jack Finney

The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not. — Jack Finney

When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both. — Jack Finney

I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician's who made a decision of profound consequence. — Jack Finney

Set flush in the wall behind the desk was a steel door. It was knobless, and along one edge were three brass keyholes spaced a few inches apart. Rube brought out a key ring, selected a key, then walked around the desk, inserted the key in the topmost lock, and turned it. From his watch pocket he took a single key, pushed it into the middle keyhole, and turned. The guard stood waiting beside him, and now the guard inserted a key in the bottom keyhole, turned it and pulled the door open with the key. Rube removed his two keys and gestured me in through the open door before him. He followed, and the door swung solidly shut behind us. I heard the multiple click of the locks engaging, and we were standing in a space hardly larger than a big closet, dimly lighted by an overhead bulb in a wire cage. Then I saw that we were at the top of a circular metal staircase. — Jack Finney

And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons. — Jack Finney

It occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act; — Jack Finney

I saw my father's wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they'd been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust. — Jack Finney

We're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it. — Jack Finney

I wrapped his pistol in his cap, and with the butt of the gun - not the end of the butt, but the side - hit him hard on the head. You read a lot about people being hit on the head and knocked out, but you don't read much about blood clots in the brain. In actual fact, though, it's a delicate matter, hitting a man on the head, — Jack Finney

Maybe I live in what is for me the wrong time. — Jack Finney

If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people. — Jack Finney

Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well. — Jack Finney

So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there. — Jack Finney

As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there. — Jack Finney

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist. — Jack Finney

Anyway, there's a time and place for everything, and while this may have been the place, it wasn't the time. — Jack Finney

It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions. — Jack Finney

I went up a straight crooked lane and, I said 'No thanks, yes if yer please. — Jack Finney

She talked all the way back to the office, looking up at me eagerly through her slanted glasses, shoving the hair back off her face. The upper edge of her glasses bisected her right eye, the lower edge bisected the left; and since one lens made half her eye slightly smaller than normal, while the other lens magnified half of the remaining eye, she seemed to have four separate half-eyes of varying sizes, resembling a Picasso painting, and I got a little dizzy and tripped and nearly fell over a curb. — Jack Finney

The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer. — Jack Finney

She wasn't actually a girl you'd turn around and look at again, and remember, I suppose; she wasn't actually pretty, I guess you'd have to say. But after I'd talked to her a few times, and had a Coke date once, when I ran into her downtown-then she was pretty. — Jack Finney

The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe - from sub-atomic particles to the universe - except itself. — Jack Finney

You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you. — Jack Finney

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again? — Jack Finney

Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it's your function, your reason for being. There's no other reason, and none needed. — Jack Finney