Harlan Ellison Quotes (79 quotes, page 2)

Harlan Ellison: 79 quotes 4 likes

Harlan Ellison Quotes

“I go to bed angry and I get up angrier every morning.”

Harlan Ellison

1990 interview, as quoted in The New York Times (28 June 2018) https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/06/28/us/ap-us-obit-harlan-ellison.html

“Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?”

Harlan Ellison book Deathbird Stories

Deathbird Stories (1975)

Love , God , Question

“I’ve been on my own since I was 13. I grew up having to use my wits. My parents were not wealthy. We weren’t poor, but we had a lot of meals with noodles. I was born during the Depression. My parents died pretty much penniless. Every dollar I’ve ever made I earned myself. I don’t believe in luck. Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." The smarter you are, the more you know, the better. I was the only Jew in town and I was my generation’s Bart Simpson. I knew the world could be mine.”

Harlan Ellison

Autograph profile (2010)

World , Parent , Chance

“Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet.”

Harlan Ellison book Eidolons

We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.
"Eidolons" (1988)

Heart

“You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in.”

Harlan Ellison

Deal from the Bottom (1960)

“And my mother said—and I remember this as if it were yesterday—my mother with a washcloth in her hand and me standing at the sink, she said, "You must have said something to get them angry."”

Harlan Ellison

And it was an icicle just jammed into my chest. That my own mother—and with cause! It was not as if I was the greatest kid in the world. I was a troublemaker! I was a brat! I was a big-mouth pain in the ass! But that my own mother would not understand—at that moment I had what, now at age seventy-two I understand, was an enormous epiphany, which is: I really cannot support it, I cannot bear it, when people laugh at me.
Source: Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018887/ (documentary), at about 28:10.
Context: About being beaten up by bullies as a child.

“You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the fucking game.”

Harlan Ellison

Interview with Gary K. Wolfe (28 July 1987), quoted in Harlan Ellison : The Edge of Forever (2002), by Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe
Borrowing a common scientific joke expressing the laws of thermodynamics.

Game

“There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems’ perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be assaulted daily by circumstances.”

Harlan Ellison book Shatterday

The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge (1978), in Terry Carr (ed.), The Year's Finest Fantasy: Volume 2, p. 83 (originally published in Analog, August 1978)

People , World