Top 15 Leigh Brackett Quotes

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.

Under the attentiveness was fear, and something else. Anger, hate—the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth.

Aren't you even curious?" he asked. "A million worlds out there with more wonders than I could tell you in a million years, and you don't even want to ask a question?

Stark said wearily, “I don’t think you understand.” Normally he was tolerant of tribal fancies, but he felt no great tenderness for the Outdwellers. “The stars are already defiled. They’re only suns, like that one over your head. They have worlds around them, like this one under your feet. People live on those worlds, people who never heard of Outdwellers or their footling goddess. And the starships fly between them. It’s all going on out there, this second as you stand here, and nothing you can do will stop it.”

The Thyrans came on, as merciless as time.

Stark did not like them. There was a touch of madness in them, born of the long dark and the too-long-held faith.

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

I can’t tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove.

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 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.

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

With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. Not that he did not believe in luck. Rather, he had found it to be an uncertain ally.

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 have let it blow through me, and it is just a wind. I have let the words sound in my ears, and they are nothing but words, spoken by an ignorant man with a dusty beard. They do not stir me, they do not touch me. I am done with them, too.
I know now what lies across the land, the slow and heavy weight. They call it faith, but it is not faith. It is fear. The people have clapped a shelter over their heads, a necessity of ignorance, a passion of retreat, and they have called it God, and worshiped it.

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