Fredric Brown Quotes

Still sitting there, still looking up in the tree.
At something that isn’t there? Luke wondered.
Or at something that isn’t there for me but is there for him, and which of us is right?
And he thinks that I don’t exist and I think I do, and which of us is right about that?
Well, I am, on that point if no other. I think, therefore I am.
But how do I know he’s there?
Why couldn’t he be a figment of my imagination?
Silly solipsism, the type of wondering just about everybody goes through sometime during adolescence, and then recovers from.
But it gives to wonder all over again when you and other people start seeing things differently or start seeing different things.

Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.

Bad, I thought, looking around me, that I’d accumulated so much. A man should never own more stuff than he can carry in his hands at a dead run. It was bad, but it had happened.

Her life, except for reading, had been dull—but it had not been in vain.

A new racket, probably. A depression breeds rackets as a swamp breeds mosquitoes.

A lot of my childhood playmates ended up behind bars and I don’t mean as bartenders.

I wished that I could pray. Then I did pray, “God, I don’t believe that you exist, and I believe that if you do exist you’re an impersonal entity and that if you notice the fall of sparrows you don’t do anything about it, on request or otherwise, but if I’m wrong, I’m sorry. And in case I’m wrong I pray to you that...”

She was sleeping. He nudged her gently and whispered a suggestion. Her eyes opened wide and startled. "No, no, a dozen times no!"
"Only a doezen times?" he asked, and then leered. "My deer," he whispered, "think of the fawn you'll have!"

The face of danger is brightest when turned so its features cannot be seen.

It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees.

"Nuts," said the Martian. "You people got rocks in your heads, that's what accounts for your superstitions."

It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length mirrors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old.

Most intelligent people of the eighties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loud-speaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses.

Well, let’s call his age as pushing sixty and not mention from which direction he was pushing it.

I thought of the distant future and the things we’d have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X.R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matter-energy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We’re Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You’ll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they’ll do and what they’ll be.
The stars? Hell, yes. They’ll have the stars.