R. A. Lafferty Quotes

Do you not know that the underground lands are shared by many worlds? It is all one underground, a vast place, and it is but a trick on which globe one will surface on coming out. This is the reason that the inside of every world is so much vaster than the outside. You are fooled by the shape of these little balls on which things live and crawl; you see the universe inside out; you see the orbs as containing and not contained. I will teach you to see it right if you please me.

The opposite of liberal is stingy. The opposite of radical is superficial. The opposite of conservative is destructive. So I declare that I am a radical conservative liberal. Beware of men who use words to mean their opposites.

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

These men were the salt of the skies, the one out of ten who had determinedly stayed alive through the whole war, very often hurt, absolutely refusing to be killed.

True love is that we should hate whatever interferes with our vision of the high and the lowly.

There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

There is a secret society of three men and four women that controls all the fashions of the world. The details of this are known to all who are in the fashion. And I am not.

There is a secret society of nineteen men that is behind all the fascist organizations in the world. The secret name of this society is Glomerule.

There is a secret society of thirteen persons known as the Elders of Edom that controls all the secret sources of the world. That the sources have become muddy is of concern to them.

There is a secret society of only four persons that manufactures all the jokes of the world. One of these persons is unfunny and he is responsible for all the unfunny jokes.

There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind all Bolshevik and atheist societies of the world. The devil himself is a member of this society, and he works tirelessly to become a principal member. The secret name of this society is Ocean....
Chesterton said that Mankind itself was a secret society. Whether it would be better or worse if the secret should ever come out he did not say.

Pottscamp felt nothing; he was, of course, a machine without feeling. He had no conscience or compassion. This would not bother him at all.
It wouldn’t?
Then why did he-?
Then why did he-WHAT?
Sat on the ground and moaned and howled like an old Hebrew. And poured dust and ashes over his head.
You’re crazy. He really did that?
He really did that.

Gaetan had always had a terrible finality about him. Was this his great sin — that he was already completed? I will intercede for him tonight in my own not entirely mechanical way. To be completed is to be finished in so many ways! May that twinkling man Gaetan be undone a little and saved.

‎Sometimes traveling people will be talking together. They will say how good it is in some places and how bad it is in others. And, sooner or later, one of them is bound to mention it. "Talk about really being out in the boondocks!" he will say, "there's a little planet named Earth —"

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.

Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is "The Day After The World Ended". … I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as "Western Civilization" or "Modern Civilization", happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was "The World" for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all "ends of worlds". Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...

I am Aeaea. To my notion there is no other lady anywhere. And I resent your calling this a silly myth. I made the myth and it is not silly; charming rather. Well, come along, come along! You are my things now, and you will come when I call you.

The shapes they take are both objective and subjective. One can shape them a little with one's own mind.

The ghost of some other fiction might say in truth to Science Fiction: “You're not very good, are you?” But Science Fiction can answer “Maybe not, but I'm alive and you're dead.

Rufinus was an orator and a lawyer, a master of civil administration and agenda. It was because of him that the Eastern Empire — Byzantium — became a bureaucracy for a thousand years; and lived on because its administration had become too intricate to die — though there are those who say that its death was concealed in a sea of paper for that one thousand years. The heritage of Rufinus was the first and longest-enduring paper Empire.
It is not accidental that in the tenure of Rufinus as Master of Offices, the duplication of written copies was first brought about. This was not on the order of carbon paper used at the instant of writing; it was wet-process copies made from a finished piece. The process is a detail, however; in the true sense Rufinus was the inventor of carbon copies. Shorthand was then five hundred years old, but Rufinus was the inventor of an improved form of shorthand.
It is believed that certain clerks of his appointing are still shuffling papers at the same desks. The paper world he set up was self-perpetuating.