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Fritz Leiber: 134 quotes2 likes

“Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 19 (p. 207)

“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.”

Short Fiction, Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963)

“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.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

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

“The idea of brutality actually shocks him, thought Goniface amusedly. I wonder what name he has for the toil we exact of the commoners, and the penances we impose on them?”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 13 (p. 126)

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

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

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

“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!”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

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

“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.”

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

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

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.”

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

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

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

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

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.”

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

“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.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

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

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

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.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

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

“You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 10 (p. 56)

“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.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

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

“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.”

Short Fiction, Catch that Zeppelin! (1975)

“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, 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)