Algis Budrys Quotes

You look like any other brainless jackanapes," he mused, "but apparently there's some gray matter left in your artfully coiffed skull after all.

Williamson threw his hands carefully up to heaven and snorted again. Apparently, everything Fay said served to confirm some judgment of mankind on his part.

“Can I drive you down to your house?”
The man flicked an expressive glance along the car’s length and shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll walk. There’s still a law of averages.”
And you can take that phrase and carve it on Humanity’s headstone, Fay thought bitterly, but did not reply.

He wondered, as he often had during his life, at people’s ability to think so intricately and to still be wrong.

I do what seems best—I live, I let live; so far I’ve done well. I don’t see why I should act like a predator, simply because I’m in a predatory society. I’m a human being, I’m myself—if I make my life something vicious, who’ll give me another if, too late, I regret what I’ve done?

The idea was to hang on to reality. It was the one crutch everybody used.

By the time of his adolescence, he had discovered an absolute lack of involvement with the human race. He studied it, because it was the salient feature of his environment. He did not live with it. It said nothing to him that was of personal value; its motivations, morals, manners and morale did not find responsive reactions in him. And his, of course, made absolutely no impression on it.

Charging back and forth isn’t progress. Small but steady forward motion is.

Only gods and television audiences see the pattern of human events.

Are our souls so much perverted?
Can we not relent?
Or are the stars the madman’s cost
For his inborn discontent?

We are born of Humankind—
This our destiny:
To bitter dwell in discontent
Wherever we may be.