Avram Davidson Quotes

Follow me, men! I'm right behind you!

The instructor-Na has observed in the Na 14 tendencies toward an archaic and dangerous quality to which the ancients gave the name personal ambition.

He who has slain one, will he abstain from slaying many?

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

It was a distinction without a difference.

But the Red Man denied that time, though it must always be paid for, could always be paid for in money.

Bloodgood Bixbee knew nothing about art, but he knew what he didn’t like.

She spun, as a matter of form and status alone, her woollen yarn and her oft-breaking thread. What else did she spin? he wondered. And the answer, not spoken aloud, was, a web.
And one that now seemed sure to hold him fast.
To hold him fast indeed.

Rumor, I fear, is scarcely as accurate as he is rapid.

Seven cities claimed blind Homer, dead,
Through which blind Homer, living, begged his bread.

Well, rather an ague than a pox. A pox is something one wishes on editors…strange breed, editors. The females all have names like Lulu Ammabelle Smith or Minnie Lundquist Bloom, and the males have little horns growing out of their brows.

The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed.

When the records of our civilization are balanced, then—but perhaps not before—the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache.

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

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