R. A. Lafferty Quotes

I'm the guy who keeps it all going. If I weren't here, you wouldn't be here either. I know it all, I'm a smart-aleck. Loan-sharking and fencing. Any time I can't see you, you've had it.

"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."

It is a southern river town with some pretensions of being a city... And like every southern river town it has its canker....
The capital has its own orneriness, as pervading as the others, but it isn't the same sort. It never was a fun town. It is not a robust sin town. Its fleshpots have no real juice in them. Its vices are effete and heterodox, and its moral rot is a dry one. Though its people have come from all parts, yet they are not all sorts of people. They are very much of one sort. The ethic climate here nurtures an ancient, evil, shriveled thing. It is of the inhabitants of this city that the prophet spoke:
Of those who do not have the faith
And will not have the fun.

Pirates are perhaps the greatest invention of Earth people," Elizabeth interrupted loftily, "and their pirate stories are wonderful entertainment for small children. We have to give Earth people credit for that, they invented pirates.

They were the highly civilized people of Cosmopolis itself. It was a fools’ carnival indeed, all split into high-spirited warring factions spilling over into masquerade. Heads were broken, and people laughed, as if it had been a thousand years before. The “Ban and Beyond” people had their banners flying, and flying wedges of opponents, with and without mottos, pulled them down in a glorious melee. The “Sackcloth and Ashes” faction was marching and joking. The newly-appointed (or self-appointed) Metropolitan of Astrobe had put that whole world under interdict, until penance be done and until certain conditions should be fulfilled; and groups were making up and singing ballads about it. High Ladies of Astrobe dressed up like old crones and hawked candy heads and skulls in honor of the beheading tomorrow. Wooly Rams were found somewhere, and spitted and barbecued over the bonfires, about fifty people devouring each Wooly Ram as they tore it apart in pieces, half seared and half raw. The feast of the Wooly Ram had not been held on Astrobe for more than three hundred years, and only antiquarians could have known about it.

Q: Didn't you mention somewhere that you were writing poetry before you were writing stories?

RAL: I was, but I didn't consider that commercial. Of course I have used a lot of those since then as chapter heads, and little verses I have scattered in. In fact I have used up all the good
ones.

The lad knew a trick for see­ing things in their right size in­stead of in the il­lu­sion that they pro­ject... The lad tried that same trick now. He turned around, bent over, and looked at the Per­son back­wards between his legs. And by that view­ing, the Per­son Him­self was a ver­it­able gi­ant, taller than the trees, taller than the dis­tance between here and a full moon. Then the lad straightened up and turned around and looked at the Per­son front­wards; and the il­lu­sion re­turned... and the Per­son was again only a rather large and al­to­gether pleas­ant man, not too large to be ac­coun­ted in the nor­mal hu­man range.

I will never tell anyone how much fun it is in this place.

Foreman, you’re the historian,” Thomas said. “It’s tha same damned thing they killed me for the first time, isn’t it?”
“Same damned thing, Thomas.

It was the most exclusive club in the world, in all the worlds, and this is a mighty pale statement to make about it. Let us emphasize that it was hard to get into.

The New Prophets began to preach by torchlight as though the latter days had come. It was the younger Pliny, those many centuries ago, who mentioned that in times of turmoil men with beards will appear instantly, when in all Rome there had not been bearded men before the moment of strife. The younger Pliny had lived in a shaved age; he believed that the bearded men who appear suddenly are wraiths or portents, and not men at all.

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.

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.

Here we come to a semantic difficulty. Other peoples who were of considerable civilization had been referred to as barbarians for more than a thousand years. Others had been called by the names of the wolves. When the wolves themselves came, there was no other name to give them. The Goths, who were kingdom-founding Christians, had been called barbarians. The Gauls of ancient lineage had been so called, and the talented Vandals.
Even the Huns had been called barbarians. This is a thing beyond all comprehension, and yet it is not safe to contradict the idea even today. The Huns were a race of over-civilized kings traveling with their Courts. In the ordering of military affairs and in overall organization they had no superiors in the world. They were skilled diplomats, filled with urbanity and understanding. All who came into contact with them, Persians, Armenians, Greeks, Romans, were impressed by the Huns' fairness in dealing — considering that they were armed invaders; by their restraint and adaptability; by their judgment of affairs; by their easy luxury. They brought a new elegance to the Empire peoples; and they had assimilated a half dozen cultures, including that of China. But the Huns were not barbarians; no more were any of the other violent visitors to the Empire heretofore.

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.