Short Fiction quotes

He began by breaking things that morning.

He broke the glass of water on his night stand. He knocked it crazily against the opposite wall and shattered it. Yet it shattered slowly. This would have surprised him if he had been fully awake, for he had only reached out sleepily for it.

“Well, it is possible that the confusion is not limited to myself. I once heard the fanciful theory that a cold shower will clear the mind. For me it never has, but I will try it. I can always use cleanliness for an excuse.”

The shower didn’t work. Yes, it did: the water came now, but not like water; like very slow syrup that hung in the air.

He reached up to touch it there hanging down and stretching. And it shattered like glass when he touched it and drifted in fantastic slow globs across the room. But it had the feel of water, wet and pleasantly cool.

“I wonder,” he said to Vincent (or to the bar at large, though there were no other customers and the bartender was asleep), “I wonder if you have ever read Zurbarin on the Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius?”

“I have never heard of the work nor of the man,” said Vincent. “I doubt if either exists.”

“I am Zurbarin,” said the man.

“I refuse to become interested in you,” said Vincent. “I am on the verge of leaving. I dislike waking the bartender, but I did want another drink.”

“Sooner done than said.”

“It is? So it is. Is it a trick?”

I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent, it is a race.”

“It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is death.”

“Let’s skip the melodrama. How do I get into the state and out of it?”

“You must be a little boy, or very like a little boy, whoever you are. You are good not to break my things when you move about. Come here and let me hold you.”

It is only very good people who have no fear at all of the unknown.

When Vincent met Jennifer in the regular world, as he more often now found occasion to do, she looked at him appraisingly, as though she guessed some sort of connection.

“No, I will do no such thing,” he said, and he struck out the last lines he had written.

“It is best to let sleeping dragons lie.”

And somewhere the faceless men with the smell of the pit on them smiled to themselves in quiet irony.

“Miss Clutt, this is a world problem. You are only an individual.”

“I am not only an individual. There is no such thing as only an individual. If ever a person can be spoken of as only an individual, then humanity has already failed.”

“We have tried reason. Now, by special emergency legislation, we are empowered to employ compulsion.”

But OMTLM had not lied.

It is not polite to lie on Pudibundia.

And that is why (though you may sometimes hear a young pilot tell amusing stories immediately—oh, very immediately—on his return from Pudibundia) you will never find an old pilot who has ever been there.

“This is still a perfect come-on here.

There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise.

Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn’t greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled.

“But it was Paradise in one way,” said Steiner at last.

“All the time we were there the woman did not speak.”

The children in the streets hooted at him.

Anthony had always had a healthy hatred for children and dogs, those twin harassers of the unfortunate and the maladjusted.

Both run in packs, and both are cowardly attackers. And if either of them spots a weakness he will never let it go. That his father had been a junk dealer was not reason to hoot at him.

But Adrian was a creature both uninterested and uninteresting.

It is very hard to confide in one who is uninterested.

“Well, I will live with it a little while,” said Anthony. “Or I may have to go to a doctor and see if he can give me something to make all these people go away.

“Think hard, Pete. Why have you a bad conscience?”

“Snakes always have bad consciences. We have forgotten the crime, but we remember the guilt.”

“Perhaps you should seek advice from someone, Pete.”

“I thought that I might lecture your patrons on the Higher Ethic.”

“Look, George Albert, my patrons don’t even have the lower ethic.”

“And just what sort of recompense are we talking about?” I asked.

“I have an uncanny suspicion. As yet it is no more than that. When I am better informed I will advise you.”

Clarissa was eight years old and much given to uncanny suspicions.

“Clementine, Harold, Corinne, Jimmy, Cyril,” he asked the five younger Willoughby children. “Do you know what happened to that fire plug?”

“One last question,” said the mayor. “Why did you smash my gold watch with the hammer?”

“Oh,” said Clarissa, “that was for dramatic effect.”