Keith Laumer

Quotes

1. I know it’s hard to grasp at first. I seem to recall I was a bit difficult to convince once. We are accustomed to thinking we know everything. There’s a powerful tendency to just disbelieve anything that doesn’t fit the preconception.

   p. 81

2. 

   Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living.

   p. 134

3. 

   Foster shook his head. “The inherent inertia of the human mind,” he said. “How it fights to resist new ideas.”

   p. 37

4. 

   “All right. Let’s begin with the world situation.”

   “I’d prefer a more cheerful subject—like cancer.”

   p. 10

5. 

   I’m arguing with myself and I can’t tell who’s winning.

   p. 49

6. 

   “I say, old man, you’re developing something of a persecution complex, I’m afraid—”

   “That’s easy, when you’re persecuted.”

   p. 128

7. 

   I know; you don’t consider it impossible. That’s the trouble with you; you don’t consider anything impossible. It would make life a lot easier for me if you’d let me rule out a few items—like leprechauns who hang out at Stonehenge.

   p. 61

8. 

   “It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all ‘established facts.’”

   p. 61

9. 

   I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry.

   p. 253

10. 

    It was easy to see the mechanics of schizophrenia at work here. From wishing, it was an easy jump to believe.

    p. 123

11. 

    “Why do you fight this war?”

    The alien mind howled out its war slogan—as incomprehensible as an astrologer’s jargon.

    p. 164

12. 

    I took all these details in as the mighty carnivore looked me over, yawned, and paced majestically toward me, frowning across at the distant herds like a troubled politician wondering who to pay the bribe to.

    p. 121