Avram Davidson Quotes

Everything meant something, still, some meanings were revealed sooner than others. And that some were seemingly never revealed in no way disproved the fact.

It had not been precisely a fruitful meeting, but it had been a long one.

Things were seldom what they seemed. People feared to tempt powers spiritual or temporal or illegal by displays of well being, and the brick screens in from of (or behind, depending on whether one were going in or going out) the doors blocked both the gaze of the curious and the path of demons. Demons can travel only in straight lines; it is the sons of men whose ways are devious.

It was but that, seeing him and so imagining that something about him was otherwise, automatically they feared him.

The fact that you know the questions, he said, a mite grudgingly, tends to make me think you might really know the answers.

I can tell you that only a fool destroys useful things merely because he doesn’t like them.

Sorcery works against Nature, magic works with it.

“Don’t you see?”
They did not see. This is the way things were done. Things were done this way. Things weren’t done another way. You did things the way you did things. You didn’t do things the way you didn’t do things.

There may be someone here who knows less about all this than I do, Clemens said, but I can't imagine who.

How is your new woman? Your new-est one, I sh'd say."
Jack shrugged. "Good enough. They all got the same thing."
"Yeh-es," Jeff nodded, judiciously. "But some of 'm's got more of it than others.

Recall the instructor at the Academy: “What is Man, young aspirants? Man is an animal that trades…”

No greed was comparable to the appeal of self-sacrifice.

It is not a very interesting night market, anyway. No wonderful things are sold there, though often one wonders, next day, how one could have bought them...

Experience may be a bitter teacher, but She is a good one.

It is not in the nature of any people that it should willingly endure being ruled by another people, whether it is ruled ill or ruled well.