Preface
Alone (1938)
Context: This book is the account of a personal experience — so personal that for four years I could not bring myself to write it. It is different from anything else I have ever written. My other books have been factual, impersonal narratives of my expeditions and flights. This book, on the other hand, is the story of an experience which was in considerable part subjective. I very nearly died before it was over.
“I know that I have died before—once in November.”
Cold Victory, in Scithers & Schweitzer (eds.) Another Round at the Spaceport Bar, p. 181. Originally appeared in Venture Science Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_Science_Fiction, May 1957
Short fiction
“I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
“I nearly always wear almost the very same things. But I alter the combinations slightly.”
Source: THE VALUE OF HUMAN DIGNITY: Brunello Cucinelli’s Vision for a Better World https://gearpatrol.com/2018/12/20/brunello-cucinelli-interview/ John Zientek, Gear Patrol, December 20, 2018
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
1848
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
Source: The Journals of Kierkegaard
Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 1, “God Save the King” (p. 40)
Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven
Song lyrics, Waking Up the Neighbours (1991)
“To tempt, and to be tempted, are things very nearly allied”
Memoirs
Context: To tempt, and to be tempted, are things very nearly allied, and, in spite of the finest maxims of morality impressed upon the mind, whenever feeling has anything to do in the matter, no sooner is it excited than we have already gone vastly farther than we are aware of, and I have yet to learn how it is possible to prevent its being excited.
Flight alone is, perhaps, the only remedy; but there are cases and circumstances in which flight becomes impossible, for how is it possible to fly, shun, or turn one's back in the midst of a court? The very attempt would give rise to remarks. Now, if you do not fly, there is nothing, it seems to me, so difficult as to escape from that which is essentially agreeable. All that can be said in opposition to it will appear but a prudery quite out of harmony with the natural instincts of the human heart; besides, no one holds his heart in his hand, tightening or relaxing his grasp of it at pleasure. <!-- Appleton &Co., 1850 p. 280
