R. A. Lafferty Quotes

The first requisite of being an intellectual is that one be intelligent. It isn’t always observed.

What had dried up was not a well or pool or ocean of physical water. What had dried up was wit, and artistry, and congruence, and enjoyment, and the sparkle of the spirit. What had dried up was creativity in every form... Musicians couldn't improvise. They had nothing left to improvise with. The art of creative lying came to an end. Profanity became tired: it became louder and more in use, but it was repetitious and unoriginal. Pornography similarly lost gusto and increased in stridency. Jokes died out, and intuitions died. Problem-solving was a lost talent. And the roily oil that had made the slide through life so much easier had now lost its slickness and turned into an abrasive. The incredible creativity by which (and only by which) persons had managed to get along with each other at all was gone... At least one-third of the persons in the world had been super-creative in personal relations. If it hadn't been so, then personal relations would have been impossible.

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.

Persons such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan say that tens of thousands (maybe tens of millions) of planets will fulfill the conditions for the support of life. And then they take the rather deceptive step from the ‘possibility of life’ to the ‘inevitability of life’ by such connivance as would shame a crooked gambler. They posit towering numbers of ‘civilizations’ on those ‘possibility-of-life planets’, at least half of them to be more advanced than the Civilization of Earth and Humankind.
But there is a strong element of Advocacy Science in this. There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything, not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.
Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction.

Listen now to a series of sayings that always come hard to brave people. Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted. We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight. But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all. Try to understand this.

The war was finished. It had lasted ten equivalent years and taken ten million lives. Thus it was neither of long duration nor of serious attrition. It hadn't any great significance; it was not intended to have. It did not prove a point, since all points had long ago been proven. What it did, perhaps, was to emphasize an aspect, sharpen a concept, underline a trend. On the whole it was a successful operation. Economically and ecologically it was of healthy effect, and who should grumble? And after wars, men go home. No, no, men start for home. It's not the same.

Death is for a long time. Those of shallow thought say that it is forever. There is, at least, a long night of it. There is the forgetfulness and the loss of identity. The spirit, even as the body, is unstrung and burst and scattered. One goes down to death, and it leaves a mark on one forever.

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.

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.

For one crime there is no asylum even in the Club," whispered Horace the Snake, who had sharp ears for whispering. "For all other crimes we give asylum, for the most heinous crime in the universe we give no asylum.

The thing that is called ‘mainstream fiction’ is an invalid masquerade of the world. It wears masks identical to the faces under the masks; it wears costumes identical to the clothes under the costumes; it enclosed the ‘world sets’ in ‘theatrical sets’ of the same appearance. What kind of masquerade is that which does not mask?

Hold! Go no further!” upset people cry out. “You are coming too near to the subject named ‘religion’!”
Yes, ‘Religion’ is one of the taboo words that modern science fictioneers may not think nor say, unless they use it to mean something else. The selective speculation which they are allowed will not stretch far enough to allow religion itself, not far enough to see that we have passed the Isthmus and have only to take off our handcuffs and blindfolds to be free. In this, the narrowness, Science Fiction stands where much science stood a hundred years ago and where almost all pseudo-science still stands today.

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 perfect ghost story is the story of Possession," he said, "and that is hypnotism from beyond the grave. This is possible since hypnotism is by the will, and the will is immortal. A number of notable men have been possessed, and all of their lives seem to fit a pattern: the inconsequential early years, the hiatus when they stood where Faust stood, and the decision. And then the rise to power and influence and almost universal honor after they have made the deal. But it is not themselves, it is the devils within them that gain these things. They are the possessed men who do much of the running of the world, and theirs is the most frightening story that can be imagined. But those who watch the great men do not know that they are shells inhabited by ghosts.

There are no rules. We do whatever seems the most fun.