Fredric Brown Quotes

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...”

I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even though I won’t know about it while it’s happening. Since I’m a public figure I suppose there’ll have to be one, but I don’t want the only person I really love there sharing in it. If I die, I don’t want you to see me dead, even the outside of a coffin. I want your last memory of me to be as I am now, alive. I don’t want you even to think about a funeral or send flowers. Will you promise me those things, Max?
“Yes, if you’ll quit talking about them.”

Living creatures, sea gulls, soaring lazily and gracefully overhead. Living creatures, a group of girls, walking by, giggling and jiggling. The lazy rhythm of the waves, the sun’s warmth and the sky’s blueness.
I waved my arm at it. “All this, M’bassi. All this and the stars too. Isn’t it enough without having to invent a religion and a God?”

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

The ever-present possibility of making a big mistake worried him.
He’d have worried about it more if he’d known that he already had.

He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And laziness is curable.

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

In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change—and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water.

It said, “Ask, what is man?”
Mechanically, he asked it.
“Man is a blind alley in evolution, who came too late to compete, who has always been controlled and played with by The Brightly Shining, which was old and wise before man walked erect.
“Man is a parasite upon a planet populated before he came, populated by a Being that is one and many, a billion cells but a single mind, a single intelligence, a single will—as is true of every other populated planet in the universe.
“Man is a joke, a clown, a parasite. He is nothing; he will be less.”

Paranoia is a form of insanity which, Dr. Randoph told me, hasn’t any physical symptoms. It’s just a delusion supported by a systematic framework of rationalization. A paranoiac can be sane in every way except one.

He knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad he did not know, but he darkly suspected. And with reason: there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a man, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways.

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.

“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
Yeah, thought Shorty McCabe, one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache.

Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don’t even hear the rustle of its wings.