K.W. Jeter Quotes & Sayings

If you are connected you're fucked. — K.W. Jeter

Creff was visibly agitated by the stranger's appearance at our door. Memory calls to mind the anxious wringing of his hands, resembling two furless pink badgers wrestling for each other's throats ... — K.W. Jeter

It's one thing to face great odds, but even the smallest struggle, if undertaken without hope, looms and swells with the fatal poisons of despair. — K.W. Jeter

He turned away from me, the better to hide the exclamation of annoyance which he muttered under his breath; I caught only what seemed to be the syllable cog (perhaps a reference to my mechanical trade) and the word succour (a prayer for divine assistance?). — K.W. Jeter

All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom. — K.W. Jeter

Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science. — K.W. Jeter

And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel. — K.W. Jeter

To retrieve the past is no great effort, when the events to be recalled are so firmly imprinted on the mind. It is existence in the present, the bleak wreckage and residue of what has gone before, that is so burdensome. — K.W. Jeter

Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires. — K.W. Jeter

Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ Herr Doktor Pavel — K.W. Jeter

I beg you to read no further. — K.W. Jeter

Life's nothing but the beating you take before you die. And I've died so many times already. Killed and lost so much. The remains. — K.W. Jeter

I believe it " announced Tafe complacently.
"That my dear " said Ambrose "is because you grew up in a rough and violent world here just managing to live from day to day is easily considered a miracle. You are able to accept the truth no matter how astonishing its guise. Whereas our friend Hocker here is steeped in the overweening rationalism of his time and could mentally dismiss a mastodon in front of him if it happened to be wearing the wrong school tie. — K.W. Jeter

In an area such as this the possibility of violence for the sake of robbery or even mere amusement is always something to be reckoned with. Our little expeditionary party had tried to dress as plainly as possible, but our great-cloaks simply by their cleanliness attracted the sinister attention of the loiterers on the street. — K.W. Jeter

Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use — K.W. Jeter

Squeaker and the Colonel were aware that death had visited them in their home, she'd come swaggering in on spike heels, and with a big noise had removed one of their number, from the world of the living to that other place where all one's batteries were run down flat and the light behind one's button eyes went out. — K.W. Jeter

Creff, my factotum, interrupted the breakfast he had brought me only a few minutes earlier and announced that a crazed Ethiope was at the door, presumably to buy a watch. — K.W. Jeter

That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains. — K.W. Jeter

It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days. — K.W. Jeter

Over the vistas broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed in vain hope and desire ... If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually, morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever. — K.W. Jeter

I had always thought myself to be a man of moderate passions indistinguishable in that respect from most Englishmen born to our logical and mannered times. — K.W. Jeter

What is the future going to be like, then?'
'Hey, it's gonna be a gas,' Scape assured me. 'If you're into machines and stuff - like I am - you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey - in the Future, everybody will want to! — K.W. Jeter