Fredric Brown

Quotes

1. Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.

   p. 243

2. 

   I wished that I could pray. Then I did pray, “God, I don’t believe that you exist, and I believe that if you do exist you’re an impersonal entity and that if you notice the fall of sparrows you don’t do anything about it, on request or otherwise, but if I’m wrong, I’m sorry. And in case I’m wrong I pray to you that...”

   p. 211

3. 

   It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length mirrors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old.

   p. 147

4. 

   I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even though I won’t know about it while it’s happening. Since I’m a public figure I suppose there’ll have to be one, but I don’t want the only person I really love there sharing in it. If I die, I don’t want you to see me dead, even the outside of a coffin. I want your last memory of me to be as I am now, alive. I don’t want you even to think about a funeral or send flowers. Will you promise me those things, Max?

   “Yes, if you’ll quit talking about them.”

   p. 208

5. 

   The ever-present possibility of making a big mistake worried him.

   He’d have worried about it more if he’d known that he already had.

   p. 89

6. 

   A new racket, probably. A depression breeds rackets as a swamp breeds mosquitoes.

   p. 277

7. 

   He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And laziness is curable.

   p. 80

8. 

   I thought of the distant future and the things we’d have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X.R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matter-energy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We’re Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You’ll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they’ll do and what they’ll be.

   The stars? Hell, yes. They’ll have the stars.

   p. 244

9. 

   Living creatures, sea gulls, soaring lazily and gracefully overhead. Living creatures, a group of girls, walking by, giggling and jiggling. The lazy rhythm of the waves, the sun’s warmth and the sky’s blueness.

   I waved my arm at it. “All this, M’bassi. All this and the stars too. Isn’t it enough without having to invent a religion and a God?”

   p. 192

10. 

    “Nuts,” said the Martian. “You people got rocks in your heads, that’s what accounts for your superstitions.”

    p. 254

That’s all the quotes.

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