Expecting Someone Taller

Quotes

1. Suddenly, she was not pretty at all; she looked like a thousand-year-old teenager who wanted something she knew she couldn’t have.

   p. 92

2. 

   “Humans!” laughed the male duck. “And it’s the likes of you run the world. No wonder the rivers are full of cadmium.”

   p. 178

3. 

   And, like many missionaries, she was not above a little persecution in the cause of the communication of Enlightenment.

   p. 56

4. 

   “You’re Loge, aren’t you? It’s odd. I was frightened of you when I thought you were the taxman, but now you turn out to be a God, I’m not frightened at all.

   p. 105

5. 

   He knew of course that there was such a thing as love, and that if you happen to come across it, as most people seem to do, it is not a thing that you can avoid, or that you should want to avoid. But you cannot go out and find it, because it is not that sort of creature. The phrase “to fall in love,” he realized, is a singularly apt one; it is something you blunder into, like a pothole. Very like a pothole.

   p. 210

6. 

   And so you give this irregularity in your minds a name of its own. You call it Love, which is meant to make everything all right. Rather than try and sort it out or find a vaccine, you go out of your way to glorify it. I mentioned your art and your poetry just now. What are your favorite themes? Love and War. The two things that any species can do, and which most species do much more sensibly than you lot—screwing and killing—are the things you humans single out to make a song and dance about. Literally.

   p. 160

7. 

   You see, the last thing my daughter wants is to be happy. She’d hate it. No, what she wants is to be finally, definitively unhappy, and for it all to be my fault. It’d finally confirm all her dearest illusions about how her life has been ruined. People like that would far rather be right than happy.

   p. 133

8. 

   It was irritating to have one’s physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.

   p. 3

9. 

   “But isn’t everybody the same? Don’t the Gods and Goddesses ever fall in love? And didn’t you once to try and chat up the Rhinedaughters?”

   Alberich winced. “It is true that the High Gods do you occasionally fall in love. You have, as a matter of fact, singled out the one race nuttier than your own.”

   p. 160

10. 

    Once again, Malcolm was moved to wonder at the stupidity, or at least the obscurity, of the King of the Gods; evidently the sort of person who, if asked to rescue a cat from a roof, would tackle the problem by burning the house down.

    p. 25

11. 

    Malcolm listened to her laughter, and for the first time in his life he knew that everything was going to be all right. Niceness, he realized, it was not enough, and Love was only part of the rest. You had to have laughter, too. Laughter would make everything come out right in the end, or if it didn’t nobody would notice.

    p. 228

12. 

    And what do they like doing best of all? They like taking off all their clothes—clothes over which they have expended so much effort and ingenuity—and doing biologically necessary but profoundly undignified things to other human beings. Any pig or spider can do that, it’s the easiest thing in the world. But you bloody humans, who can do so much that no other species could ever do, you can’t do that efficiently. You agonize over it. You make an incredible fuss over it. You get it all wrong, you make each others’ lives miserable, you write dreary letters and take overdoses. You even invent a medicine that deliberately makes the whole process futile. My God, what a species!

    p. 159

13. 

    Malcolm had never been greatly inclined to metaphysical or religious speculation, but he had hoped that if there was a supreme being or divine agency, it would at least show the elements of logic and common sense in its actions. Seemingly, not so. On the other hand, the revelation that the destiny of the world had been shaped by a bunch of verbose idiots went some way towards explaining the problems of human existence.

    p. 23

14. 

    They don’t mean anything, you know. They hurt, but they’re only feelings. They don’t draw blood or make it difficult for you to breathe. They’re all in the mind. Life is about eating and drinking and sleeping and breathing and working, and not being more unhappy than you absolutely have to.

    p. 177

That’s all the quotes.

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