A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

Quotes

1. Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?

   p. 75

2. 

   But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody.

   p. 113

3. 

   Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary.

   p. 240

4. 

   What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.

   p. 41

5. 

   “Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?”

   “No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.”

   p. 142

6. 

   Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced.

   p. 92

7. 

   A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing.

   p. 266

8. 

   What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?

   p. 33

9. 

   The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.

   p. 93

10. 

    He forgave these Tropemen, then felt contempt for himself for the presumption of extending forgiveness, then forgave again, then cursed his own vanity, forgave once more, condemned his presumption, and at last forgave even himself.

    p. 265

11. 

    God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is.

    p. 34

12. 

    “Magistrate, a problem doesn’t cease to exist simply because you cease to consider it a problem.”

    ”Very often, Deputy Foutlif, it does.”

    p. 200

13. 

    Coercion is the tool of the desperate.

    p. 64

14. 

    Like all such prophecies, it’s impressive only if not examined too closely.

    p. 249

15. 

    Both God and man hold each other in equally beautiful contempt.

    p. 196

16. 

    I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative.

    p. 35

17. 

    “Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.”

    “The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.”

    “Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.”

    p. 83

That’s all the quotes.

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