R. A. Lafferty Quotes

I don't regard myself as a Surrealist in the sense of the "Surrealist Manifesto" published by Andre Breton in 1924. To me, that Manifesto is somewhat dated, being a recoil from World War I, and being too heavily Freudian. My own unconscious is more Jungian than Freudian. But if Breton hadn't staked claim to the name, I would probably call myself a Surrealist in the "Remembrance of Things Within" sense, but not in the "world of dream and fantasy joined to the everyday rational world, becoming 'an absolute reality, a surreality'." I suppose that I believe in another sort of a surreality or super-reality, but it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of myself and me. As often as not, it is the subconscious that supplies the rational element, and the exterior world that supplies the dream and fantasy feeling.

"I finally saw the whole conspiracy standing as plain as an elephant in the street; also the conspiracy was admitted to me in great detail by one of the princes of the conspiracy."
"Bad, Smith, very bad."
"If one of the inmates should come to you right now, Doctor, and tell you it was raining outside, you'd say 'Bad, very bad', and make damning marks on his record."
" That's probably true. It's an automatic response with me."

Paul, there is something very slack about a future that will take a biting satire for a vapid dream.

Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards' span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: “Here it becomes necessary to pause for a moment and to recount to you the history of the world up to this point.”
After Fabulinus had given the history of the world up to that point, he took up the action of Raphaelus once more. It happened that the giant goose egg contained a nubile young girl. This revelation would have been startling to a reader who had not just read the history of the world up to that point; which history — being Fabulinian in its treatment — prepared him for the event.

The historian Cassiodorus believed that the selective destruction of Alaric, as regards the Greek monuments, was of good effect. Alaric had some taste and was awed by really great art. The Greeks were only human, and all their work could not have been excellent. But almost all their ancient work that survived the ravages of Alaric was of unsurpassed excellence.
There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands. There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of the Gothic Greek adventure; not in Athens, or Megara or Corinth or Argos. Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art.
It is said that Alaric destroyed half of the art of Greece. It may have been the worst half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness.

Oh, come along, reader of the High Journal; if you do not love words, how will you love the communication? How will you forgive me my tropes, communicate the love?

Science Fiction is a group of symptoms and not a disease,” so a medical student (failed) told me once. “It's like the old disease hydropsy that doctors treated for so long before discovering that it was only a collection of symptoms, sometimes for a heart disease, sometimes for a liver or kidney disease, or sometimes even for a septic throat.”
Well, the symptoms for Science Fiction are a prowling avidity to search out and read certain occult texts; an uneasiness or excitement that permates the whole routine of life; it's the ‘itchy ears’, as mentioned in Scripture, seeking for ‘new things’. The symptoms are usually a falcon-like hunting or questing; a series of sudden tuneful encounters; a group of euphorias and buoyancies that cry in opposite directions to be hoarded like misers' treasures and simultaneously to be shared with fellow sufferers of the symptoms; feeling that the ‘World We Live In’ is somehow masked and needs to be unmasked. These and other symptoms indicate either a strange disease or diseases, or they indicate a perpetually new kind of health.
Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.

Beware of those who manufacture final answers as they go along, of those who will catch you on their catch-phrases and let you perish in the traps. All the final answers were given in the beginning. They stand shining, above and beyond us, but they are always there to be seen. They may be too bright for us, they may be too clear for us. Well then, we must clarify our own eyes. Our task is to grow out until we reach them.

There was supervised recreation. This is the original contradiction of terms. It was for making suggestions about supervised recreation that the devil was cast into hell; any other account you have heard is false.

If you have come with high expectations of anything, you have come to the wrong place.

What about Cathead?” Thomas asked the precis machine.
“Cathead is the cancer that is being excised from this world. It is the cancer because the inhabitants of Cathead regard themselves as individuals and believe in the importance of themselves. Yes, Cathead is quite large, the largest of the cities, larger even than Cosmopolis the capital. We will leave Cathead out of account here since it is not typical of Astrobe.

The Western Empire, supported generation after generation by half a hundred of the strongest and most remarkable men in history, from Stilicho to Charlemagne, died and disintegrated and left off being the Empire.
The Eastern Empire, supported by fools and slaves and fops, and ruled by the worst and most incompetent of men and women, managed to endure and thrive for a thousand years more.

And at almost the identical time two men were murdered. One of them was a Great Liberal Statesman who was actually a shoddy phony, and one was a Well-Beloved Conservative Leader whose own family couldn't stand him. There was a further distortion. The reports of both murders were out slightly before they happened, and partisans of both men had begun to gather.
And just previous to the riots, an army detachment had crossed over from Virginia to put down the riots. The military could not find the reported corpses strewing the sidewalks. Wisely they waited. They were only a little bit early.
In other sections, students attacked soldiers. The students always averaged about ten years older than the soldiers.

The Dong button was just that, a big green button with the word Dong engraved on it. You pushed it, and it went dong. Well, that was almost too simple. Should there not be a deeper reason for it? And the small instruction plate over it didn’t add much. It read: “Wrong prong, bong gong.”

Creo plenamente en la santa pobreza, pero aseguro que la miseria es como la bebida; un poco resulta estimulante y constructiva; demasiado es denigrante y horrible.