Philip José Farmer: Likeness

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”

Philip José Farmer

Imagination

“Drowned idols swirl like seeds in chaos' wine.
Look, Job! Caught Beauty, held to light, now apes
A good, now evil, thing — the shifting sign
And spectrum of archaic, psychic shapes.”

Philip José Farmer

"Job's Leviathan" in JD Argassy #58 (1961); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)

Wine

“It was like no hell or heaven of which he had ever heard or read, and he had thought that he was acquainted with every theory of the afterlife.”

Philip José Farmer

Source: The Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), Chapter 1 (pp. 3-4)
Context: It was like no hell or heaven of which he had ever heard or read, and he had thought that he was acquainted with every theory of the afterlife.
He had died. Now he was alive. He had scoffed all his life at a life-after-death. For once, he could not deny that he had been wrong. But there was no one present to say, "I told you so, you damned infidel!"
Of all the millions, he alone was awake.

Hell , Reading

“And there is another feeling, one which he shares with most of humankind. He knows he's screwed up his life, or something has twisted it. Every thinking man and woman knows this. Even the smug and dimwitted realize this unconsciously. But a baby, that beautiful being, that unsmirched blank tablet, unformed angel], represents a new [[hope. Perhaps it won't screw up. Perhaps it'll grow up to be a healthy confident reasonable good-humored unselfish loving man or woman. 'It won't be like me or my next-door neighbor,' the proud, but apprehensive, parent swears.”

Philip José Farmer book Riders of the Purple Wage

Of Chib
Riders of the Purple Wage (1967)

Love , Life , Beauty , Hope

“The aerial canoe had no visible means of support, he thought, and it was a measure of his terror that he did not even think about his pun. No visible means of support. Like a magical vessel out of The Thousand and One Nights.”

Philip José Farmer

Source: The Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), Chapter 1 (pp. 5-6)

Support , Thinking , Night

“Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.”

Philip José Farmer

First line, spoken by Sam Clemens.
The Riverworld series, The Fabulous Riverboat (1971)