Leigh Brackett Quotes

“Better to make haste slowly than not at all,” said Amnir sententiously.

The man who doesn’t fear, doesn’t live long. I fear everything.

Was he trying to frighten you?"
"I don't think so," said Len. "I think he was just telling me the truth.

I grew up with the idea of it," said Hostetter. "Nobody ever taught me that it was evil or forbidden, or that God had put a curse on it, and that's the difference.

The mountains dwindled away into hills covered with a dark, stunted scrub. Beyond them the land flattened out to the horizon, a treeless immensity of white and gray-green, a spongy mossiness flecked with a million icy ponds. The wind blew, sometimes hard, sometimes harder.

There’s never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn’t think he was fully justified. That’s a mental trick called rationalizing, and it’s done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.

Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it.

You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.

There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close, frightening small of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well.

Invisibility is a condition of godhead. If folk could see them, they would know the truth, and the Lords Protector would cease to be divine.

But for today, yesterday, tomorrow, it is not important. Time goes on without any of us. Only a belief, a state of mind, endures, and even that changes constantly, but underneath there are two main kinds—the one that says, Here you must stop knowing, and the other which says, Learn.
Right or wrong, the fruit was eaten, and there can’t ever be a going back.
I have made my choice.

I guess we've got a lot to learn."
"Quite a lot," said Hostetter thoughtfully. "It won't be easy, either. So many things will jar against every belief you've grown up with, and I don't care how you scoff at it, some of it sticks to you.

I thought they knew," Len said. "I thought they were sure of it."
"Research isn't done that way."
"But how can they spend all that time, and maybe that much more again, if they know it might be all for nothing?"
"Because how would they know if they didn't try? And because there isn't any other way to do it.

Hell, how do you think the human race ever learned anything, except by trial and error?"
"But it all takes such a long, long time," said Len."
"Everything takes a long time. Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life, and what are you complaining about, anyway?

Will it always stay like this?"
"Nothing," said Hostetter, "ever stays always like anything.