Fritz Leiber: Thing

“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.”

Fritz Leiber

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

Question , Universe

“Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 17 (p. 95)

Life , Death , Pain , Truth

“I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religions, too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, or an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have inner things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no man-made theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing.”

Fritz Leiber

“A Bit of the Dark World” (pp. 261-262); originally published in Fantastic, February 1962
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

Life , God , World , Religion

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

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

Personality

“But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 1 (p. 15)

Thinking , Sun

“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 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

“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

“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)

Pleasure , Youth , Family , Thinking

“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)

Life , Personality

“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.”

Fritz Leiber

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

Failure , Understanding , Sense , Personality

“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).