Brian Aldiss Quotes

I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete.

The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That at least was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being.

At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.

The greatest human achievement is to fulfil one’s destiny.

Plato would have no actors in his republic, in case pretence devoured what was real. Plato's fears have proved well-grounded. Actors, despised, almost outcast, until last century, have become something more than respectable. They, together with all those imitation actors, pop stars, TV celebrities, people who are famous for being famous, now receive adulation. They are the millionaires, the courtesans of our system. Solzhenitsyn, escaping to a West he had once admired, snarled at the meretricious falsity of what he found. We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.

The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.

This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.

Never, never let action become a substitute for thought.

They were both sweating freely.

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

It’s empty where kings live.

The night was alive. So thickly was the snow falling that, brushing against a human face in its descent, it resembled the fur of a great beast. The fur was less cold than suffocating: it occupied space normally taken up by air and sound. But when the sledge stopped, the staid brazen tongue of a bell could be distantly heard.

Are you a religious man, Joe?" Flitch pulled a face. "I leaves that sort of thing to women.

Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them — So they covered it up again...

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.