James Blish

Quotes

1. No exercise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than marginally better than who we are.

   p. 118

2. 

   Now that I'm a free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if that’s what pleases me.

   p. 206

3. 

   Munitions and magic are circles that don’t intersect very effectively.

   p. 36

4. 

   I’ve already given you the whole explanation of how that came about. It happened because it was going to happen. All other explanations for anything are superfluous. All other explanations for anything.

   p. 89

5. 

   In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!

   p. 158

6. 

   “The motto of the bureau,” Weinbaum said, “is, ‘sometimes something works.’”

   p. 75

7. 

   A common thief with a gun in his hand isn’t half as dangerous as an engineer with a stick of dynamite.

   p. 110

8. 

   Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we call motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event coming—and, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen...or ascribes it to the malice of God or man.

   p. 84

9. 

   But now the shots began—not many, but one shot is a fusillade if there have been no shots before.

   p. 213

10. 

    One death is as good as another, if death is what you are courting.

    p. 186

11. 

    Martel still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences.

    p. 63

12. 

    Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be totally intent upon nothing at all.

    p. 80