Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con.

Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?

I got to my feet and looked around the room. Just a room, only the one door. I tiptoed towards it. When I passed Janie, she opened her eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered.

‘None of your business,’ I told her. I went to the door as if I didn’t care, but I watched her. She didn’t do anything. The door was as solid tight closed as when I’d tried it before.

I went back to Janie. She just looked up at me. She wasn’t scared. I told her, ‘I got to go to the john.'

’‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why’n’t you say so?’

'Suddenly I grunted and grabbed my guts. The feeling I had I can’t begin to talk about. I acted as if it was a pain, but it wasn’t. It was like nothing else that ever happened to me before. Something went splop on the snow outside.'

‘Okay,’ Janie said. ‘Go on back to bed.'

‘But I got to – ’

'You got to what?'

’Nothing.’ It was true. I didn’t have to go no place.

There’s this about a farm: when the market’s good there’s money, and when it’s bad there’s food.

Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness — just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist.

Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen.

Dear Mr. Garry,

Let us face it. Small considerations, magnified by the conventions, are not important to people like you and me. It is our duty to found a super-race together. My background of deep study into esoteric matters has convinced me that the only thing that can save the race is to people the world with the superior strain evident in both of us. I enclose a nude photograph of myself and will appreciate it if you will do likewise. I am thirty three years old and have kept myself sacrosanct awaiting this great moment.

A man with talent eats, sweats, and cares for his children like any other. And if talent is a natural thing, remember that water is also, and fire, and wind; therefore flood and holocaust and hurricane are as natural as talent, and can consume and destroy you.

She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belongs to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.

A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.

This country has music through its blood and bones like a disease, and a man cannot draw in a breath of air that isn’t a-thrum with it.

You cannot be objective about this because you have been indoctrinated, sermonized, drenched, imbued, inculcated and policed on the matter since first you wore blue booties. You come from a time and place in which the maleness of the male, and the femaleness of the female, and the importance of their difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation.

"I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.

In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.

("The Graveyard Reader")"

Be a man. Not any old man, not mankind, but manhood. To do this you don’t need to play pro football and grow hair on your chest and seduce every third woman you meet long as she’s female. All you have to do is hunt, fish (or talk sense about ’em as if you had) and go bug-eyed when the girls go by. If a sunset moves you so much you have to express yourself, do it with a grunt and a dirty word. Or you say, ‘That Beethoven, he blows a cool symphony.’ Never champion a real underdog unless it’s a popular type, like a baseball team. Always treat other men as if you were sore at something and will wipe it off on them if they give you the slightest excuse. I mean sore, Louis, not vexed or in a snit. And stay away from women. They have an intuition that’ll find you nine times out of ten. The tenth time she falls for you, and there’s nothing funnier.”
“I think,” Loolyo said after a time, “that you hate human beings.

“Now how can you like a man without wanting him?” she demands of herself aloud.
There is no answer. It is an article of faith with her. If you like a man, it has to be because you want him. Whoever heard of it any other way?