Fritz Leiber Quotes

Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?

The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition.

No matter how hard and wearisome an age this might be, it was certainly a very exciting one with regard to manifestations of the supernatural.

Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all.

He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.

When one achieves revenge, the innocent perforce suffer.

“You’ve got to believe there’s some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.”
“Crazies?”
“All of us.”

Women have power over men almost as great as gods do.

“Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors,” the harbormaster answered him, “while truth plods on in sober garb.”

Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot.

For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?

What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end.

What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.

Pulg, alongside his pink streak of sentimentality, had recently taken to sporting a gray one of superstition.

The idea of brutality actually shocks him, thought Goniface amusedly. I wonder what name he has for the toil we exact of the commoners, and the penances we impose on them?