Brian Aldiss Quotes

The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.

Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane.

Sounds to me as if you want journalists," Timberlane said. "No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it's a way of life.

In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy.

The directors of Synthank were eating an enormous luncheon to celebrate the launching of their new product. Some of them wore the plastic face-masks popular at the time. All were elegantly slender, despite the rich food and drink they were putting away. Their wives were elegantly slender, despite the food and drink they too were putting away. An earlier and less sophisticated generation would have regarded them as beautiful people, apart from their eyes.

Men left their strange hobbies on Earth and Venus and projected themselves into the pattern. Their entire personalities were merged with the texture of space itself. Through science, they reached immortality. It was a one-way passage. They did not return. Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. There they were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in their transubstantiation, no one left could say. Only this could be said: man had gone, and a great emptiness was fallen over Earth.

Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to overconsume.

-Expansion to your ego, friend.
-At your expense.

She strengthened her will by saying “It is the Way.

The stone in my hand hides
A secret natural history:
Climates and times unknown,
A river unseen.

Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?

When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he molded and complicated his tools, so they molded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern; the pattern is all the universe, creator and created.

A later generation could have explained the miracle to Sir Frank — though explaining in terms he would not have understood. Though he knew well enough the theory of family traits and likenesses, it would have been impossible then to make him comprehend the intricacy of a chromosome which carries inside it — not merely the stereotypes of parental hair or temperament — but the secret knowledge of how to breathe, how to work the muscles to move the bones, how to grow, how to remember, how to commence the processes of thought … all the infinite number of secret "how to's" that have to be passed on for life to stay above jelly level. A freak chromosome in Sir Frank ensured he passed on, together with these usual secrets, the secret of his individual consciousness.

I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn't I?

Never, never let action become a substitute for thought.