James Blish Quotes

Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be totally intent upon nothing at all.

They had all been things, not people, to each other, which after all is the only sensible and fruitful attitude in a thing-dominated world. (Except, of course, for Father Domenico, whose desire to prevent anybody from accomplishing anything, chiefly by wringing his hands, had to be written off as the typical, incomprehensible attitude of the mystic—a howling anachronism in the modern world, and predictably ineffectual.) And in point of fact none of them—not even Father Domenico—could fairly be said to have failed. Instead, they had all been betrayed. Their plans and operations had all depended implicitly upon the existence of God—even Jack, who had entered Positano as an atheist, had been reluctantly forced to grant that—and in the final pinch, He had turned out to have been not around any more after all. If this shambles was anyone’s fault, it was His.

You’ll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn’t any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age…every time with a new, invented mystical reason.

One death is as good as another, if death is what you are courting.

I’ve already given you the whole explanation of how that came about. It happened because it was going to happen. All other explanations for anything are superfluous. All other explanations for anything.

Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we call motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event coming—and, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen...or ascribes it to the malice of God or man.

It isn’t every composer who can premier his own last opera posthumously.

A common thief with a gun in his hand isn’t half as dangerous as an engineer with a stick of dynamite.

Sam was too good a scientist to let that hope creep into his hypothesizing.

Martel still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences.

Never assume that any fact is useless until it is so proven.

High intelligence did not imply superior ability to come to terms with one’s social environment; indeed, there seemed to be some sort of rough correlation between high intelligence and the accumulation of aberrations.

The first thing a psychologist learns is to keep her mouth shut around laymen.

Now that I'm a free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if that’s what pleases me.

No exercise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than marginally better than who we are.