David Gerrold Quotes

So what happens when the camera is finally invented?
Handley let his breath escape in a whoosh. "The artists are out of jobs?"
"Wrong. The artist simply have to learn how to do things that the camera can't. The artist had to stop being a recorder and start being an interpreter. That's when expressionism was born."

There are only two times when it's appropriate for a man to have his nose in a woman's vagina. The first time is when he's stark naked and weighs about 7 lbs.

Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.

The way I heard it, a contract is a list of all the ways two people don’t trust each other.

I wish I could change it all. I wish I could.
But I can’t.
Dammit.
Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful.

It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but it was strange to feel it in the daytime. Mostly, it was a nighttime visitor, an ever-gentle gnawing at the back of the head that had to be always guarded against, lest its realization sweep forth with a cold familiar rush. It was the sudden startling glimpse over the edge—the realization that death is inevitable, that it happens to everyone, that it would happen to me too; that someday, someday, the all-important I (the center of the whole thing) would cease to exist. Would stop. Would end. Would no longer be. Nothing. Nobody. Finished. Death.

It was as private as the main floor of Hell.

Not that he was jealous of the machine—but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master.
Love.

You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference.

You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.
Live well, my son.

They say that killing is a mortal sin, that it is against the laws of God. If that is true—and I know now that it must be—if that is true, then every man who has ever taken a human life has been, from that moment on, damned for eternity. No matter how many men or nations say that it is all right for a man to take up arms against an enemy, it does not change that one basic fact—killing is a mortal sin.
And every one of those simple white markers we had stood among represents a soul condemned.
A nation had sentenced her sons to damnation so that she might survive.
There’s no such thing as a “moral war.”

There isn’t a tool built that can’t be used as a weapon.

Love isn't what you get. It's what you create.

Whatever our purpose, we probably aren't fulfilling it. We're not functioning as we should.
He shrugged at her. "How should we function?"
"Like human beings." She said it righteously.
"Isn't that what the human race is already doing? Functioning like human beings—squabbling with each other, killing each other, hating...?"
"That's not human."
"Oh, but it is. It's very human."
"Well, it's not what human should be."
"Now that's a different story. You're not talking about what people are, but what you want them to be."
"Well, maybe we should be what we aren't because what we are now isn't good enough. Maybe we should be dismantled."
"I don't think we have to worry too much about somebody up there doing it—we're doing it ourselves."

I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss.