Philip José Farmer Quotes

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

What does that mean?"
"I don't know, but it sounds deep. I'll think up an explanation later.

And love, if put off too long, was too late, wasted. It could not make up for the lost time, no matter how much was then poured out.

Burton, though an infidel, made it his business to investigate thoroughly every religion. Know a man’s faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

as if it were a gear tooth meshed with the cog of another man’s dream and rotated into and then out of his dream.

Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.

Styles was an old Mississippi pilot, a handsome youth, no liar, though given to inflating facts.

Let's give this entity which you call soul another name. Soul has too many incorrect meanings for humans, too many verbal reverberations, too many contrary definitions.

The way is open, comrades, free as Space
Alone is free. The only gold is love,
A coin that we have minted from the light
Of others who have cared for us on Earth
And who have deposited in us the power
That nerves our nerves to seize the burning stars.

It’s not what a person says but what he does that reveals his true character.

As for paranoia, anyone who has the imagination to postulate all possibilities is automatically a paranoiac.

- И защо човечеството получи своята Втора Възможност? - попита Колоп с тихия си сериозен глас.
- Нима я заслужава? Не. С малко изключения хората са подло, нищожно, дребнаво, злобно, тесногръдо, невероятно себично, вечно препиращо се и гнусно гъмжило. Като го наблюдават, боговете - или Бог - би трябвало да повърнат. Но в тази божествена храчка се намират и съсиреци на състраданието, моля да ме извините, че си служа с подобни образи. Колкото и да е долен човекът, той съдържа сребърната нишка на божественото в себе си. Не е безсмислено твърдението, че човек е сътворен по образ и подобие Божие. И в най лошите сред нас има нещо, което си струва да бъде съхранено, и от това нещо може да възникне новият човек.

The world took a shape which he could grasp, though he could not comprehend it. Above him, on both sides, below him, as far as he could see, bodies floated. They were arranged in vertical and horizontal rows. The up-and-down ranks were separated by red rods, slender as broomsticks, one of which was twelve inches from the feet of the sleepers and the other twelve inches from their heads. Each body was spaced about six feet from the body above and below and on each side.
The rods came up from an abyss without bottom and soared into an abyss without ceiling. That grayness into which the rods and the bodies, up and down, right and left, disappeared was neither the sky nor the earth. There was nothing in the distance except the lackluster of infinity.

Drowned idols swirl like seeds in chaos' wine.
Look, Job! Caught Beauty, held to light, now apes
A good, now evil, thing — the shifting sign
And spectrum of archaic, psychic shapes.

I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.