Cemetery World

Quotes

1. The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

   p. 39

2. 

   Like so many other fairy tales, I thought it was a horror story.

   p. 129

3. 

   “As an auxiliary to all of this,” he said, “I have found myself speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he'd have no need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life would be eternal and there'd be no thought of change. One would exist in an everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to the next, one would not be aware of this and there'd be no boredom...”

   p. 148

4. 

   You do not understand what happens in war—a sort of sublime madness, an unholy hatred that is twisted into an unreasoning sense of righteousness…

   p. 62

5. 

   “I find it a most intriguing and amusing thing that it might be possible to package the experiences, not only of one's self, but of other people. Think of the hoard we might then lay up against our later, lonely years when all old friends are gone and the opportunity for new experiences have withered. All we need to do then is to reach up to a shelf and take down a package that we have bottled or preserved or whatever the phrase might be, say from a hundred years ago, and uncorking it, enjoy the same experience again, as sharp and fresh as the first time it had happened”... “I have tried to imagine,” said our host, “the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it — the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before.”

   p. 147

6. 

   Someone must have known, but I never did. I have often wondered. It was the only way, you see, that a war could still be fought. No human could go to fight that kind of war. So man’s servants and companions, the machines, carried on the war. I don’t know why they kept on fighting. I have often asked myself. They’d destroyed all there’d ever been to fight for and there was not use of keeping on.

   p. 40

7. 

   “I bore you, Mr. Carson?”

   “Not at all,” I told him. And it was the truth. He was not boring me. He fascinated me. It seemed impossible that he could, in conscience, believe this flowery rubbish.

   p. 12

That’s all the quotes.

7 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more