Fritz Leiber Quotes

“He had the illusion, he said, of getting perilously close to the innermost secrets of the universe and finding they were rotten and evil and sardonic.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 6 (p. 37).
Context: They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say “planet” and “spaceship” to them, they still think “horoscope” and “flying saucer”.

“It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.”

“The Dreams of Albert Moreland” (p. 182); originally published in The Acolyte, #10, Spring 1945
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

Fritz Leiber Quotes

“In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it’s true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 26).

“The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but — doubtless because they are afraid someone will some day raise the ever-unpleasant question of the true worth of things — they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk at and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale.”

The Big Time (1958)

“You’ve got to believe there’s some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.”
“Crazies?”

Source: Bazaar of the Bizarre (pp. 233-234) note: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939-1988), Swords Against Death (1970)

“I am up to date only sporadically. I live firmly in the world of art, where reality and fantasy are one.”

“All of us.”
Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 30 (p. 181)

“I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!”

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 16 (p. 89)

“There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 3.

“What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 5 (p. 33).

“Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 42 (p. 340).

“Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 34 (p. 270).

“The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence.”

The Big Time (1958)

“Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 33 (p. 259).

“I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.”

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 8 (p. 43)

“It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos — and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards! — masquerading as benign omniscient authority.”

The Big Time (1958)

““Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.”
“They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.””

The Big Time (1958)

“Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie
In the sky
When you die—
It’s a lie!”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 14 (p. 145)

“There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.”

“Bread Overhead” (p. 121); originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1958; alluding to the song The Preacher and the Slave.
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

“What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 33 (p. 259).

“You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess,” he assured her. “It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them.”

The Big Time (1958)

“I’ll have to learn to snowshoe. I had my first lesson this morning and cut a ludicrous figure. I’ll be virtually a prisoner until I learn my way around. But any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!”

“The 64-Square Madhouse” (p. 74); originally published in If, May 1962
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

“There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken.”

“Diary in the Snow” (p. 203); originally published in the first edition of Night's Black Agents (1947)
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

“Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.”

Short Fiction, Catch that Zeppelin! (1975)

“What is idealism? It is distortion. A giving of false values to things which in reality do not possess those values. Personalities differ chiefly in their pattern of values. When the values are largely false, the personality is unstable.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 40 (p. 312).

“The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes — so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell.”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 10 (p. 106)

“After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything.”

Short Fiction, Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963)

“Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 19 (p. 195)

“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!”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 16 (p. 113).

“To understand why George fell for this story, one must remember his stifled romanticism, his sense of personal failure, his deep need to believe. The thing came to him like, or rather instead of, a religious conversion.”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 14 (p. 144)

“A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.”

“Time Fighter” (p. 67); originally published in Fantastic Universe, March 1957
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 3 (p. 39).

“Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”

Fritz Leiber book Poor Superman

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951, under the title "Appointment in Tomorrow".
Short Fiction, Poor Superman (1951)

“Besides, what difference did if make if there had been two genuine coincidences? The universe was full of them. Every molecular collision was a coincidence. You could pile a thousand coincidences on top of another, he averred, and not get Tom Digby one step nearer to believing in the supernatural. Oh, he knew intelligent people enough, all right, who coddled such beliefs. Some of his best friends liked to relate “yarns” and toy with eerie possibilities for the sake of a thrill. But the only emotion Tom ever got out of such stuff was a nauseating disgust. It cut too deep for joking. It was a reversion to that primitive, fear-bound ignorance from which science had slowly lifted man, inch by inch, against the most bitter opposition.”

“For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?”

“The Hill and the Hole” (p. 165); originally published in Unknown Worlds, August 1942
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

“Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all.”

The Big Time (1958)

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 10 (p. 106).

“Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears.”

“It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.”

The Big Time (1958)

“Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse.”

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 15 (p. 83)

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 20 (p. 209).

“He knew that ahead lay many perils—threats to his bodily welfare. And recently Jarles had come to have a great respect for that bag of flesh and bones which contained his ego.”

“The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 12 (p. 117)

“Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 42 (pp. 336-337).

“The Devourers want to brood about their great service to the many universes — it is their claim that servile customers make the most obedient subjects for the gods.”

Short Fiction, Catch that Zeppelin! (1975)

“I thought of how people are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distance barring them off from each other.”

Short Fiction, Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963)
Source: Bazaar of the Bizarre (p. 234) note: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939-1988), Swords Against Death (1970)

““Conscience is only social pressure,” he told her, tense without quite knowing why, “the impulse to submerge your ego in that of the herd, and do what other people want you to because you’re afraid of their censure. Realistic self-interest frees a person from the childish restrictions of conscience.”
“Are you sure of that, Jarles? What about your dreams? Conscience may be partly what you say it is, but it’s more than that. It’s hearkening to the wisest thoughts that have occurred to the minds of the human race.””

“A Bit of the Dark World” (p. 263)
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

“No matter how hard and wearisome an age this might be, it was certainly a very exciting one with regard to manifestations of the supernatural.”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 14 (pp. 145-146)

“That’s what everybody’s been looking for since the Year One—something a little more than sex.”

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 5 (p. 54)