Fritz Leiber quotes - page 2
Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. "The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some thick fur or the petals of flowers-you've never seen those, but you know our ice-flowers-or like the texture of flames, never twice the same. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the last man as for the first.
Fritz Leiber
Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it.
"Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose.
"Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.
Fritz Leiber
Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords-those are true-and some do not, and those are merely bad art.
Fritz Leiber
Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families-and their own youth-actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class.
Fritz Leiber
I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn't been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy-unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!
Fritz Leiber
