„Sentir sa responsabilité, c'est sagesse. Penser qu'on peut l'assumer seul n'est que déraison.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
Walter M. Miller citations
9 2Walter M. Miller
Date de naissance: 23. janvier 1923
Date de décès: 9. janvier 1996
Walter Michael Miller, Jr., né le 23 janvier 1923 à New Smyrna Beach, en Floride, aux États-Unis et mort le 9 janvier 1996 en Floride, est un auteur de science-fiction américain.
Citations Walter M. Miller
„Nous avons toujours éprouvé la plus fervente affection pour les frères de Saint-Leibowitz. Sans vos travaux, sans vous, les hommes auraient peut-être tout oublié. L'Église est un Corps, Mysticum Christi Corpus, et votre ordre a servi d'organe de la mémoire en ce Corps.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„Le doute est un puissant instrument qui doit être appliqué à l'histoire.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„On disait que Dieu, pour mettre à l'épreuve l'humanité devenue aussi orgueilleuse qu'au temps de Noé, avait ordonné aux sages de l'époque, et parmi eux au Beatus Leibowitz, de construire de grandes machines de guerre, telles qu'on en n'avait jamais vu sur terre. Des armes d'une telle puissance qu'elles contenaient le feu même de l'Enfer.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„Si vous essayez de conserver la sagesse pour le jour où le monde sera sage, mon père, le monde ne connaîtra jamais cette sagesse.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„La Vérité pouvait être crucifiée. Mais bientôt peut-être y aurait-il résurrection.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„La liberté de produire toutes les hypothèses est essentielle.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„L'ignorance a été notre reine. Depuis la mort des empires, elle est assise sur le trône de l'Homme de façon indiscutable. […] Demain régnera une ère nouvelle. Les hommes intelligents, les hommes de science se tiendront derrière son trône, et l'univers en viendra à connaître son pouvoir. Son nom est la Vérité. Son empire sera la Terre entière.“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„Comment une civilisation sage et puissante a-t-elle pu s'autodétruire?“
Citations de ses romans, Un cantique pour Leibowitz (A Canticle for Leibowitz), 1960
„When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 26
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Contexte: The abbot snapped off the set. "Where’s the truth”? he asked quietly. “What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil. Was there any justification in our ‘police action’ in space? How can we know? Certainly there was no justification for what they did — or was there? We only know what that thing says, and that thing is a captive. The Asian radio has to say what will least displease its government; ours has to say what will least displease our fine patriotic opinionated rabble, which is what, coincidentally, the government wants it to say anyhow, so where’s the difference?"
„He had never seen a "Fallout," and he hoped he'd never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 1
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo
Contexte: He had never seen a "Fallout," and he hoped he'd never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends. He crossed himself and backed away from the hole. Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a Fallout, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his Baptism drove the fiend away.
Brother Francis visualized a Fallout as half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge, and as half-incubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep, for, were not the monsters of the world still called "children of the Fallout"? That the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which descended upon Job was recorded fact, if not an article of creed.
„But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child.“
"The Will" (1953)
Contexte: There is a difference between tragedy and blind brutal calamity. Tragedy has meaning, and there is dignity in it. Tragedy stands with its shoulders stiff and proud. But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child.
„The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years…“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo
Contexte: The monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
„She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 29
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Contexte: She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain. There was something about her eyes that caused him to notice nothing else for several seconds. But then he noticed that the head of Mrs. Grales slept soundly on the other shoulder while Rachel smiled. It seemed a young shy smile that hoped for friendship. He tried again.
"Listen, is anyone else alive? Get —"
Melodious and solemn came her answer: "listen is anyone else alive — " She savored the words. She enunciated them distinctly. She smiled over them Her lips reframed them when her voice was done with them. It was more than reflexive imitation, he decided. She was trying to communicate something. By the repetition, she was trying to convey the idea: I am somehow like you.
But she had only just now been born.
And you're somehow different, too, Zerchi noticed with a trace of awe.
„Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 25
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Contexte: Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion, he thought.
„For that there would have to be infinite love as well.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 22
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux
Contexte: But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.
„They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 30
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Contexte: They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child into the ship. The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back. The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.
„Reasoning which touches experimental reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients?“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 20
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux
Contexte: Reasoning which touches experimental reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients? Certain references tend to indicate it. One paper refers to elemental transmutation — which we just recently established as theoretically impossible — and then it says — 'experiment proves.' But how?
It may take generations to evaluate and understand some of these things. It is unfortunate that they must remain here in this inaccessible place, for it will take a concentrated effort by numerous scholars to make meaning of them.
„Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 4
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo
Contexte: How easy it would have been flatly to have told the boy that his pilgrim was only an old tramp of some kind, and then to have commanded him not to think otherwise. But by allowing the boy to see that a question was possible, he had rendered such a command ineffective before he uttered it. Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey.
„He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection.“
— Walter M. Miller, Jr., livre A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ch 29
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Contexte: The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life. He did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs. Grales, or why God gave to it the preternatural gifts of Eden — these gifts which Man had been trying to seize by brute force again from Heaven since first he lost them. He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection. One glimpse had been a bounty, and he wept in gratitude. Afterwards he lay with his face in the wet dirt and waited.
Nothing else ever came — nothing that he saw, or felt, or heard.
