Fritz Leiber: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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)

Lie

“There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

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

Sense

“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

“A Pail of Air” (p. 20); originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

Love , Life , Flowers , Business

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

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

“What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?”

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 11 (p. 116).

Life

“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.”

Fritz Leiber

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

Game

“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!”

Fritz Leiber

“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)

Way , Soul , Learning

“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.”

Fritz Leiber

Short Fiction, Catch that Zeppelin! (1975)

“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.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

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

Time

“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.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

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

Reality , Personality , Falseness