Short Fiction quotes

“It might happen some day,” he argued. “Just think.

Love oiled, welded, built of metal, wired for sound!

” He laughed triumphantly, but it was a low laugh, a strange little sound. Bella expected him to beat his chest next. “Robots fall in love at first sight,” he announced, “and blow an audio tube!”

Bella smiled tolerantly. “

You’re such a child, Sam. I sometimes wonder why I married you.

”

Arms, legs and heads littered the deck. The boys, it seems, threw a party at the drop of a chin. Sort of a space cataclysm with rules and little regulation—kind of an atomic convulsion in the front parlor.

The neighbors never complained. The neighbors were 450 million miles away.

And the boys were tighter than a catsup bottle at lunchtime. The last time the captain had looked up the hatch and called to his kiddies in a gentle voice, “Hell!” the kiddies had thrown snowballs at him. The captain had vanished.

Out into the staggering rain they dashed. Five minutes later they came back in, gasping, reeling. They had forgotten their corsets!

The Venusians closed in like a million landlords.

“Charge, men!” cried Quelch, running the other way. And then—battle! “What a fight, folks,” cried Quelch. “Twenty thousand earth men against two Venusians! We’re outnumbered, but we’ll fight!” Bloosh! “Correction—ten thousand men fighting!” Kerblom! “One hundred men from earth left!” Boom!

One Venusian looked at the other Venusian, and in a high-pitched, hoarse, sad voice said: “Aye, aye, aye—this—hit shooden heppen to a dog—not a doidy leedle dog!”

And dawn came peacefully, like beer barrels, rolling.

Brandon took in his breath. Numbly he realized it was not his son.

Every time a new body was found he feared and yet hoped it would be Richard.

Richard of the easy laughter and good smile and dark curly hair. Richard who was now floating off somewhere toward some far eternity.

Breathing deeply, he lay back. They were taking his child back out into space. Lazarus, his second son, whom he had birthed out of space with a metal retriever, they were taking back out and away from him.

You can’t have your real son; so you take the second best and you slap him into breathing life, into breathing consciousness, and before he is a day old they try to tear him away from you again.

Brandon fairly yelled against his manacles of wire. Sweat came down his face, and the stuff from his eyes wasn’t all sweat.

It got quiet.

It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids rushing up, cold, blue and hard.

You could hear your heart kicking a tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.

Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking quick crazy, unimportant things.

The best scenes in life never reach film, or an audience.

Like this one, dammit! Like this one! His brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his camera.

“

Me father taught me; keep laughing and you’ll have Irish luck.

”

He didn’t like it any more.

Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere.

You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn’t laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial.

He kept thinking the one thing he couldn’t forget.

You never catch up with the war.

All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead.

Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the airlock.

That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.

You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands.

A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett’s head. You never catch up with the war!

But what if the war catches up with you?

What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?

Do you really think about it? It’s enough to scare the guts from a man. Hold me up. Do something. Give me sedatives or hold my hand or run call mama. A million cold miles up. See all the flickering stars?

Look at my hands tremble. Feel my heart whirling like a hot pinwheel!

The captain comes toward me, a stunned expression on his small, tight face. He takes my arm, looking into my eyes. Hello, captain. I’m sick, if that’s what you want to know. I’ve a right to be scared—just look at all that space!

Strange. As they talk, I hear their words flow over my head like a wave dashed on a sea-stone, but the words drain off, leaving no imprint.

As soon as some words invade my head, something eats and digests them and I think the words are something else entirely.

The psychiatrist nods at me.

During the night, Sim was born.

He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.

He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.

And he would live exactly eight days.

The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight short days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother’s flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.

Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning.

Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.

Eight days from now he’d stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.

“

An hour is half a life.

”

Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. “Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts.

In five seconds you’ve made an enemy for life. Life’s so short enemies must be made quickly.

” And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. “You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you.

Their kisses were long and lingering, not the parched mouthings and twitchings of lovers who had eight days to live. The grass remained, and did not burn away in torches.

The dream people talked always of tomorrow and living and not tomorrow and dying.

It all seemed so familiar that when Sim felt someone take his hand he thought it simply another part of the dream.

Chion laughed and adjusted a sharp stone in his hand. “

Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power.

The cliffs there, besides, are smaller, there’s room for only three hundred people in them.”

“I do not see it!” She increased her pace, turning her head away.

He saw the floss upon her neck, like the small moss that grows silvery and light on the cool side of pebbles, that stirs if you breathe the lightest breath upon it.

He looked upon himself, his hands clenched as he heaved himself forward toward death. Already his hands were veined and youth-swollen.

They slipped and skidded on moss-smooth pebbles. Lyte fell, scrambled up again with a burning oath. Her body was scarred and dirty. The rain washed over her.

The rain came down and cried on Sim.

It filled his eyes and ran in rivers down his spine and he wanted to cry with it.

“Yes,” said Stanley doggedly, “we cure man’s cancer and preserve his greed in a special serum.

They used to say ‘Starve a cold, stuff a fever.’ Today’s fever is materialism.

All the things science has produced only touch the Body. When Science invents something to touch the Mind, I’ll give it its due. No.

Yes, he would give them their rocket. He would give it to them.

You cannot fight the children, he thought. They must have their green apples.

If you refuse them, they will find a way around you. Go along with their illogical tide and make logic of it. Let the children eat their fill of green apples, many, many green apples to swell their vast stomach into sickness. Yes.

“The moon Rocket is returning! It will land this morning at nine o’clock!” Everybody’s audio was blatting.

Like a yellow seed, the Rocket dropped down the sky, to sprout roots of flame on which to cushion itself.

It fried the tarmac and a vast deluge of warm air rushed across the country for miles. People sweltered amidst a sudden rocket summer.

Like a yellow seed, the Rocket dropped down the sky, to sprout roots of flame on which to cushion itself. It fried the tarmac and a vast deluge of warm air rushed across the country for miles.

People sweltered amidst a sudden rocket summer.

In his tower room, William Stanley watched, solemn and wordless.

In a thousand other cities there were trees and children and avenues, business men in their quiet offices taping their voices, or watching televisors. Rockets hovered like darning needles in the blue sky.

There was the universal, quiet conceit and easiness of men accustomed to peace, quite certain there would never be trouble again.

Arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front. The perfect weapons were held in equal trust by all nations. A situation of incredibly beautiful balance had been brought about. There were no traitors among men, no unhappy ones, no disgruntled ones;

“No wonder. We’re pretty darn strong,” laughed Mom, cleaning up. Mink sat there, staring at the table, seeing what she was talking about.

“Until, one day,” whispered Mink, melodramatically, “they thought of children!”

“Well!” said Mrs. Morris brightly.

“Well!” said Mrs. Morris brightly.

“And they thought of how grownups are so busy they never look under rosebushes or on lawns!”

“Only for snails and fungus.”

“You do.

Why is it children hate water? No matter what age you live in children hate water behind the ears!

”

“Drill says you’re dangerous. Know why? Cause you don’t believe in Martians! They’re going to let us run the world. Well, not just us, but the kids over in the next block, too. I might be queen.” She opened the door. “Mom?”

“Logic? Why, dear, logic is knowing what things are true and not true.”

“He mentioned that,” said Mink. “And what’s im—pres—sion—able?” It took her a minute to say it.

“Worse. Japs and Nazis. Don’t know how my parents put up with me. Tomboy.”

“Parents learn to shut their ears.”

“What’s wrong, Mary?” asked Helen.

The chair massaged her back. Children, children. Children and love and hate, side by side. Sometimes children loved you, hated you, all in half a second. Strange children, did they ever forget or forgive the whippings and the harsh, strict words of command? She wondered.

How can you ever forget or forgive those over and above you, those tall and silly dictators?

Time passed. A curious, waiting silence came upon the street, deepening.

You don’t want death and you don’t expect death.

Something goes wrong, your rocket tilts in space, a planetoid jumps up, blackness, movement, hands over the eyes, a violent pulling back of available power in the fore-jets, the crash. …

“I’ll just walk and look at the rocks and the geological formations and think how good it is to be alive,” he said.

“Ye gods,” cried his censor. “William Saroyan!”

You’ll go on, he thought, maybe one day, maybe one night, but what about the next night and the next, and the next? Can you stay awake all that time, for six nights? Until the rescue ship comes? Are you that good, that strong?

Ten thousand men hurtled across the small hidden stage.

Ten thousand men floated on the shellacked inner ball of his eye.

Ten thousand javelins hissed between the small bone hulls of his head. Ten thousand jeweled guns exploded. Ten thousand voices chanted in his ears.

“They don’t want me, or need me,” he said. “Machines are better, nowadays. Why should they want an old man like me with a taste for Martian liquor? They shouldn’t!

A machine isn’t old and foolish, and doesn’t get drunk!

”

“Machines,” shrilled Nibley. “Can’t do everything!

They ain’t got no intuition. Can’t understand sabotage and hatreds and arguments. Or people.

Machines’re too damn slow!”

Somebody whistled. Others chuckled. Kroll relaxed. Bruno scowled. Nibley continued, “

It’s a feelin’. You can’t describe stars to a blind man, or God to anybody.

Why, hell’s bells, lads, if I wanted I could write a formula on paper and if you worked it out in your mind you’d drop dead of symbol poison.”

Faces became wooden at the mention of the approaching Belt. Fingers tightened against the table edge. Nibley spidered back up the rungs to his little room alone.

An hour later, Nibley was drunk as a chromium-plated pirate.

He kept it a secret. He hid the wine-bottle in his shock-hammock, groggily. Stroke of luck. Oh yes, oh yes, a stroke, a stroke of luck, yes, yes, yes, finding that lovely fine wonderful wine in the storage cabinet near the visiport. Why, yes!

He came out of the earth, hating. Hate was his father; hate was his mother.

It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath!

It was good to walk again, to feel the wind and to hear the leaves scuttling like mice on the road ahead of him. It was good to see the bitter cold stars almost blown away by the wind.

It was even good to know fear again.

For fear rose in him now, and he could not put it away. The very fact that he was walking made him an enemy.

“War is declared,” he said, and laughed.

It was pretty silly, one man declaring war on an entire world.

The world did not answer back. A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.

The world did not answer back.

A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.

Footsteps. Lantry hastened to the edge of the cemetery. The diggers, coming back to finish up their work? No. Just someone, a man, walking by.

… saying he had never been in the Incinerator before, when he knew damned well that all children were brought here on tours, every year, from the time they were four, to instill the idea of the clean fire death and the Incinerator in their minds.

Death was a bright fire, death was warmth and the sun. It was not a dark, shadowed thing.

That was important in their education. And he, pale thoughtless fool, had immediately gabbled out his ignorance.

and the control man told you, because everybody told the truth in this world of the future, nobody lied, there was no reason to lie, there was no danger to lie against.

There was only one criminal in the world, and nobody knew he existed yet.

Oh, it was an incredibly beautiful setup. The Control Man had told him just how the Incinerator worked, what pressure gauges controlled the flood of fire gasses going up the flue, what levers were adjusted or readjusted. He and Lantry had had quite a talk.

By one thing, and one thing alone.

Hatred was a blood in him, it went up down around and through, up down around and through.

It was a heart in him, not beating, true, but warm. He was—what? Resentment. Envy. They said he could not lie any longer in his coffin in the cemetery. He had wanted to.

But then they had come and said, “Out you go and into the furnace!” And that is the worst thing you can say to any man. You cannot tell him what to do.

If you say you are dead, he will want not to be dead. If you say there are no such things as vampires, by God, that man will try to be one just for spite.

If you say a dead man cannot walk, he will test his limbs. If you say murder is no longer occurring, he will make it occur. He was, in toto, all the impossible things.

Once upon a time people shuddered when they heard the wind about the house, once people raised crucifixes and wolfbane, and believed in walking dead and bats and loping white wolves.

And as long as they believed, then so long did the dead, the bats, the loping wolves exist. The mind gave birth and reality to them.

He looked at the white sheeted bodies.

But he was not alive.

Friction gave him what little warmth he possessed.

There were two hundred dead people here in this warehouse now, cold upon the floor. The first dead people in a hundred years who were allowed to be corpses for an extra hour or more.

They were completely dead. They did not know nor believe in walking once the heart had paused and stilled itself.

They were deader than dead ever was.

He was indeed alone, more alone than any man had ever been. He felt the chill of his aloneness moving up into his chest, strangling him quietly.

They were completely dead. They did not know nor believe in walking once the heart had paused and stilled itself. They were deader than dead ever was.

He was indeed alone, more alone than any man had ever been.

He felt the chill of his aloneness moving up into his chest, strangling him quietly.

A rocket went across the black heaven, trailing fire.

Mars burned red among a million stars.

Mars. The library. The librarian. Talk. Returning rocket men. Tombs.

Laugh if you will, but one can tell. It is a subliminal thing. It is the whistle the dog hears when no human hears. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices.

Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.

”

“Once you kill all of us, and you’re alone, you’ll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You’ll die, inevitably. You’re not immortal.

You’re not even alive, you’re nothing but a moving hate.

”

I am an autumn-empty tree. I am a rapping, flinging shutter. I am a yellowed volume turned by a claw hand. I am an organ played in an attic at midnight.

I am a mask, a skull mask behind an oak tree on the last day of October.

I am a poison apple bobbling in a water tub for child noses to bump at, for child teeth to snap. … I am a black candle lighted before an inverted cross.

I am a rapping, flinging shutter. I am a yellowed volume turned by a claw hand. I am an organ played in an attic at midnight. I am a mask, a skull mask behind an oak tree on the last day of October.

I am a poison apple bobbling in a water tub for child noses to bump at, for child teeth to snap.

… I am a black candle lighted before an inverted cross. I am a coffin lid, a sheet with eyes, a footstep on a black stairwell. I am Dunsany and Machen and I am the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

I can’t be sad. I’m alive when I make these tapes. And you’re alive when you hear them. Both of us, to the other, incomprehensible. Neither can warn the other, even though both respond, one to the other, one automatically, the other warmly and humanly.

I’m human now. You’re human later. It’s insane.

I can’t cry, because not knowing the future I can only be optimistic. These hidden tapes can only react to a certain number of stimuli from you. Can you ask a dead man to weep?”

I’m human now. You’re human later. It’s insane. I can’t cry, because not knowing the future I can only be optimistic. These hidden tapes can only react to a certain number of stimuli from you.

Can you ask a dead man to weep?

”

“Don’t expect my sympathy. You’re like a stranger, off in another country. I can’t be sad.

I’m alive when I make these tapes. And you’re alive when you hear them.

Both of us, to the other, incomprehensible. Neither can warn the other, even though both respond, one to the other, one automatically, the other warmly and humanly. I’m human now. You’re human later. It’s insane.

“

I’m lonely. I only live when I speak. So I must speak.

You can’t shut me up forever.”