Credit where credit is due; I don't have all these books. The following quotes & passages were included by Terry Dowling in the collection The Essential Ellison:
The great lizards owned the planet for something like 130,000,000 years, but they didn't have slant-well drilling, pesticides, pollution, fast breeders, defoliants, demagogues, thermonuclear warheads, non-biodegradable plastics, The Pentagon, The Kremlin, The General Staff of the People's Army, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and the FBI. [. . .] Had they not been so culturally deprived, they might have sunk into the swamps in a mere three thousand years.
"Reaping the Whirlwind," introduction to Approaching Oblivion, 1974
My soul says, tomorrow cannot be trusted to naked apes. [. . .] I cannot argue with my soul, it will hear no counter-suggestion. And what can I do? I'm trapped in here with the lunatic.
"Stealing Tomorrow," Trumpet #11, 1974
Speculative fiction in modern times really got born with Walt Disney in his classic animated film, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. Sure it did. I mean: a mouse that can operate a paddle-wheeler?
"Thirty-Two Soothsayers," Introduction to Dangerous Visions, 1967
And prime among that unhappy family's myths was the one that Harlan, Serita and Doc's kid, Beverly's brother, would wind up either dead or in an alley somewhere, having come to a useless end . . . or rotting away his old age in a Federal Penitentiary. That I became a writer of some repute and became the first member of either [. . .] family to get listed in Who's Who in America, confounds them to this day. To them, I am like the snail known as the Chambered Nautilus, that has a shell with rooms in it. As the Nautilus lives its brief life it moves from room to room in its shell and finally emerges and dies; thus, it literally carries its past on its back. [. . .]
It is probably no different for anyone reading these words. All families form their opinions of the children early, and so we spend the rest of our lives in large part paying obeisance to shadows who neither care nor in fact have any power over our reality.
"My Mother," 1976
He said, "I don't want to come up for very long. We might get in trouble." He meant it. He liked her. [. . .]
But he could not refuse her. And he was good with her, as good as he could be, accepting the responsibility, hoping that when she found the man she had been saving herself for, he would be very very loving. At least, he knew, he had put her out of the reach of the kind of men who sought virgins. Neither the sort who would marry only a virgin, nor the sort who went on safari for such endangered species, were human enough for her.
"The Other Eye of Polyphemus," 1977
Now I realize this may ring tinnily on the ears of those of you who spend the greater part of your off-hours lurching after your gonads, but having edited a men's magazine in Chicago some years ago, the sight of a lady in deshabille does not cause sweat to break out on my palms. What I'm saying is that after two years of examining transparencies framed in a light-box, while wearing a loupe to up their magnification, all said transparencies of the world's most physically-sensational women, all stark naked . . . one develops a sense of proportion about such things. One begins looking for more exotic qualities—such as the ability on the part of the ladies to make you laugh or cry or feel as though you've learned something.
"Valerie: A True Memoir," 1972
| foolsguinea's other pages of quotes: § miscellaneous short quotes § e e cummings (poetry) § Peter Porter: After Martial (poetry) § Daniel Quinn 1: excerpt from Providence § Daniel Quinn 2: various shorter passages § Sarah Byam (essays) |
fool's guinea | |