Edgar Rice Burroughs Quotes

In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers.

"It must be that I am dreaming, and that I shall awaken in a moment to see that awful knife descending toward my heart- kiss me, dear, just once before I lose my dream forever."

-Jane-

If there be a fate that is sometimes cruel to me, there surely is a kind and merciful Providence which watches over me.

Tarzan sat in a brown study for a long time after he finished reading the letter. It was filled with so many new and wonderful things that his brain was in a whirl as he attempted to digest them all. So they did not know that he was Tarzan of the Apes. He would tell them.
In his tree he had constructed a rude shelter of leaves and boughs, beneath which, protected from the rain, he had placed the few treasures brought from the cabin. Among these were some pencils.
He took one, and beneath Jane Porter's signature he wrote: I am Tarzan of the Apes

But metaphor, however poetic, never slaked a dry throat.

how futile is man's poor, weak imagination by comparison with Nature's incredible genius.

To lose the only creature in all his world who ever had manifested love and affection for him was the greatest tragedy he had ever known.

My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes.

Among other things he found a sharp hunting knife, on the keen blade of which he immediately proceeded to cut his finger. Undaunted he continued his experiments, finding that he could hack and hew splinters of wood from the table and chairs with this new toy.

In Tarzan's clever little mind many thoughts revolved, and back of these was his divine power of reason. If he could catch his fellow apes with his long arm of many grasses, why not Sabor, the lioness?

Two keen eyes had watched every move of the party from the foliage of a nearby tree. Tarzan had seen the surprise caused by his notice, and while he could understand nothing of the spoken language of these strange people their gestures and facial expressions told him much.

With the success of my first story, l decided to make writing a career, though I was canny enough not to give up my job. But the job did not pay expenses and we had a recurrence of great poverty, sustained only by the thread of hope that I might make a living writing fiction. I cast about for a better job and landed one as a department manager for a business magazine. While I was working there, I wrote Tarzan of the Apes, evenings and holidays. I wrote it in longhand on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would sell. But Bob Davis saw its possibilities for magazine publication and I got a check … this time, l think, for $700.

Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.

She was a dear girl and a stanch and true comrade—more like a man than a woman.

I was armed only with a hunting knife, and this I whipped from its scabbard as Kho leaped toward me. He was a mighty beast, mightily muscled, and the urge that has made males fight since the dawn of life on earth filled him with the blood-lust and the thirst to slay; but not one whit less did it fill me with the same primal passions. Two abysmal beasts sprang at each other’s throats that day beneath the shadow of earth’s oldest cliffs—the man of now and the man-thing of the earliest, forgotten then, imbued by the same deathless passion that has come down unchanged through all the epochs, periods and eras of time from the beginning, and which shall continue to the incalculable end—woman, the imperishable Alpha and Omega of life.