Short Fiction quotes

“We just couldn’t connect. I tried ‘rock,’ and I tried ‘star,’ and ‘tree,’ and ‘fire,’ and Lord knows what else, and try as I would, I couldn’t get a single word!

Nothing was the same for two successive minutes, and if that’s a language, I’m an alchemist!

Finally I gave it up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to do.

“Maybe,” said Jarvis dubiously. “Well, there we were. We could exchange ideas up to a certain point, and then—blooey! Something in us was different, unrelated; I don’t doubt that Tweel thought me just as screwy as I thought him.

Our minds simply looked at the world from different viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours.

But—we couldn’t get together, that’s all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I liked Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me.”

“Lord! That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless—just a mechanism, and yet—immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it’ll just stop. It won’t be dead.

If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it’ll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past.

A queer beast—yet I met a stranger one!”

“Right!” said Jarvis. “

The dream-beast uses its victim’s longings and desires to trap its prey.

The bird at nesting season would see its mate, the fox, prowling for its own prey, would see a helpless rabbit!”

and gestured toward the south. I took it to mean that some other race had created the canal system, perhaps Tweel’s people. I don’t know; maybe there’s still another intelligent race on the planet, or a dozen others.

Mars is a queer little world.

“A hundred yards from the city we crossed a sort of road—just a hard-packed mud trail, and then, all of a sudden, along came one of the mound builders!

“What could I do? I’d be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn’t explain that to him. I said, ‘Thanks, Tweel. You’re a man!’ and felt that I wasn’t paying him any compliment at all.

A man! There are mighty few men who’d do that.

“So I went ‘bang’ with my gun and Tweel went ‘puff’ with his, and the barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming about being friends. I had given up hope.

“What could I do? I’d be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn’t explain that to him.

I said, ‘Thanks, Tweel. You’re a man!’ and felt that I wasn’t paying him any compliment at all.

A man! There are mighty few men who’d do that.

“Well,” retorted Jarvis defiantly, “that only proves that government is a primitive device, doesn’t it?

With a perfect race you wouldn’t need it at all; government is a confession of weakness, isn’t it?

It’s a confession that part of the people won’t cooperate with the rest and that you need laws to restrain those individuals which a psychologist calls antisocial. If there were no antisocial persons—criminals and such—you wouldn’t need laws or police, would you?”

“It strikes me dumb, too,” muttered Jarvis. “I don’t know how to tell it; I’m a chemist, not a poet. Paradise is as good a word as I can think of, and that’s not at all right.

It was Paradise and Hell in one!

”

“It strikes me dumb, too,” muttered Jarvis. “

I don’t know how to tell it; I’m a chemist, not a poet.

Paradise is as good a word as I can think of, and that’s not at all right. It was Paradise and Hell in one!”

“You’re welcome, then!—not only your noble desires, remember! Every good impulse, yes—but also every nasty little wish, every vicious thought, everything you’d ever desired, good or bad!

The dream-beasts are marvelous salesmen, but they lack the moral sense!

”

I saw every lovely place I’d ever wanted to be, all packed queerly into that little valley. And I saw—other things.” He shook his head soberly. “It wasn’t all exactly pretty.

Lord! How much of the beast is left in us!

I suppose if every man alive could have one look at that weird valley, and could see just once what nastiness is hidden in him—well, the world might gain by it. I thanked heaven afterwards that Leroy—and even Tweel—saw their own pictures and not mine!”

“But what is reality?” asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. “

All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine.

”

“You drink,” said the elfin, bearded face, “to make real a dream. Is it not so? Either to dream that what you seek is yours, or else to dream that what you hate is conquered.

You drink to escape reality, and the irony is that even reality is a dream.

”

Dan laughed. “

Of course nobody knows anything. You just get what information you can through the windows of your five senses, and then make your guesses.

When they’re wrong, you pay the penalty.” His mind was clear now save for a mild headache. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “You can argue a reality away to an illusion; that’s easy.

The Grey Weaver stared at him. “I do not understand.

Substance, indeed, may love shadow, but how can shadow love substance?

”

The old man peered at him in the dusk. “

Has anyone, anywhere, a voice in the laws?

” he queried.

“Madness!” growled Leucon. “Manmade laws! Of what use are man-made laws with only man-made penalties, or none at all?

If you shadows make a law that the wind shall blow only from the east, does the west wind obey it?

”

He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. “Humph!” he grunted. “

Time changes everything but habit, I see.

You were a good student, Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the middle of the lecture.”

“Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of van Manderpootz?

A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop from my feast of thoughts!

Had you gone back into the last century, now—had you mentioned Einstein and de Sitter—there, perhaps, are names worthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!”

“I have,” he said grimly. “I most assuredly have. Time,” he said oracularly, “is money.”

You can’t argue with a viewpoint like that.

But those aspersions of his rankled, especially that about the Baikal. Tardy I might be, but it was hardly conceivable that my presence aboard the rocket could have averted the catastrophe. It irritated me;

I hated equally not finding out.

Uncertainty has its pangs too, quite as painful as those of remorse.

It might be less nerveracking to know myself responsible than to wonder, to waste thoughts in vain doubts and futile reproaches.

I admitted it. “I seem to be chronically late.

Even watches lose time as soon as I wear them.

”

Even my father noticed something queer about me. The day I got to the office only five minutes late, he called me in for some anxious questioning as to my health. I couldn’t tell him anything, of course.

How could I explain that I’d been late once too often, and had fallen in love with a girl two weeks after she was dead?

The thought drove me nearly crazy. Joanna! Joanna with her silvery eyes now lay somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic. I went around half dazed, scarcely speaking.

“But Heaven, by definition, is a place where all is perfect.

Therefore, in Heaven everybody is exactly like everybody else, and therefore, everybody is thoroughly and completely bored!

There is no torture like boredom, Dixon, and—Well, have I proved my point?”

I must be a prude at heart, for she wasn’t wearing the usual cuirass-and-shorts of that year, but an iridescent four-paneled costume that all but concealed her dainty knees.

But her form was slim and erect as a column of cigarette smoke in still air, and I knew that she could dance like a fragment of mist on water.

And with that thought she did move, dropping in a low curtsy, and looking up with the faintest possible flush crimsoning the curve of her throat. Yes, I must be a prude at heart;

“Not before you made somewhat of a fool of yourself, I believe,” she finished sweetly.

Well, that’s the sort she was. If she hadn’t been so infernally lovely, if she hadn’t looked so much like the face in the mirror, I’d have flared up, said “Pleased to have met you,” and never have seen her again.

But I couldn’t get angry, not when she had the dusky hair, the perfect lips, the saucy nose of the being who to me was ideal.

“Yes,” said van Manderpootz. “I’ve dismantled it. One of van Manderpootz’s few mistakes was to leave it around where a pair of incompetents like you and Denise could get to it.

It seems that I continually overestimate the intelligence of others. I suppose I tend to judge them by the brain of van Manderpootz.

”

I go farther than that, infinitely farther. I propound the theory that the observer is the point of view. I go even beyond that,

I maintain that the world itself is merely the point of view!

”

It is equally obvious that a strictly religious man occupies a different world than that of a materialist. The fortunate man lives in a happy world; the unfortunate man sees a world of misery. One man is happy with little, another is miserable with much.

Each sees the world from his own point of view, which is the same as saying that each lives in his own world.

Therefore there are as many worlds as there are points of view.”

After a few moments I was able to give my full attention to the phenomena of the attitudinizor, and queer phenomena they were, too. I scarcely know how to describe the sensation of looking at the world through the filter of another’s mind.

It is almost an indescribable experience, but so, in the ultimate analysis, is any other experience.

What I saw first was a kaleidoscopic array of colors and shapes, but the amazing, astounding, inconceivable thing about the scene was that there was no single color I could recognize!

At this point I caught a glimpse of myself through the eyes of van Manderpootz. Ouch!

Perhaps I’m not a genius, but I’m dead certain that I’m not the grinning ape I appeared to be in his eyes.

And perhaps I’m not exactly the handsomest man in the world either, but if I thought I looked like that—! And then, to cap the climax, I apprehended van Manderpootz’s conception of himself!

“A very silly paradox!” he snapped. “

On the basis of that theory, since the higher one goes in the scale of intelligence, the fewer individuals one finds, the greatest achievement of all is one that nobody has heard of.

By that test you would be greater than van Manderpootz, an obvious reductio ad absurdum.”

But all I considered at the moment was my own curiosity; I wanted to learn what sort of viewpoint could produce that strange, instantaneous flash of beauty.

If the proceeding was unethical⁠—well, Heaven knows I was punished for it.

So I turned the attitudinizor on Carter. At the moment, he was listening respectfully to van Manderpootz, and I sensed clearly his respect for the great man, a respect that had in it a distinct element of fear.