Conjure Wife

“Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them.””

— Fritz Leiber

“Certainly we’ve made important innovations, chief among them the systematic use of the scientific method,” he said at one point, “but the primitive groundwork is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We’re modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could you expect us to be?””

— Fritz Leiber

“Of course it had been an hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, with a score of coincidences to back them up, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way”

— Fritz Leiber

“and most modern and all surrealist art is nothing but attempted witchcraft, borrowing its forms from the primitive witchdoctor and its ideas from the modern theosophist.” He””

— Fritz Leiber

“There are two sides to every woman.” It might have been a mummy dispensing elder wisdom. “One is rational, like a man. The other knows. Men are artificially isolated creatures like islands in a sea of magic, protected by their rationality and by the devices of their women. Their isolation gives them greater forcefulness in thought and action, but the women know. Women might be able to rule the world openly, but they do not want the work or the responsibility. And men might learn to excel them in the Art. Even now there may still be male sorcerers, but very few.””

— Fritz Leiber