Quotes by R. A. Lafferty

“There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee. There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be. Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm.These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied like a trooper (he was a trooper). He effected assassinations (removal of semi-military obstructions). He forged names to treaties (astute frontier politics). He was part of a weird plot by men of both the North and South to extinguish the Indians whoever should win the war (devotion to the ideal of national growth ) . He personally arranged twelve separate civil wars among the Indians (the removal of the unfit) . After all, those were war years; and he did look like Moses, and perhaps he sounded like him.””

“Put the nightmare together. If you do not wake up screaming, you have not put it together well.””

“The first requisite of being an intellectual is that one be intelligent. It isn’t always observed.””

“But time heals all wounds. That is a proverb, an untrue proverb. There wounds unhealed by time enough to fill every lazare from the beginning. All time can do is to give a little time, to achieve composure, to make a mask. You build it out of textured wax, and if you are skilful it looks just like your face, just like your face will look ten years from now. But it doesn’t fit right. You never saw one that fit right. But the world goes on. That’s another thing that people say. It doesn’t. It jolts a little bit and bumps; and then it comes to a stop. The scenery unrolls backwards and gives the impression that the world goes on. Bit it does not go.””

“It has been said that heresy is the revenge of a forgotten truth.””

“When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him.””

“The art of story-telling has not been declining from the beginning. It has been declining for only about twelve thousand years. One reason for the decline is a dietary deficiency: the scarcity of Wooly Rhinoceros Meat and of Dire Wolf Meat. And the other reason is the disappearance of good places where good stories may be told.””

“The ghost of some other fiction might say in truth to Science Fiction: “You're not very good, are you?” But Science Fiction can answer “Maybe not, but I'm alive and you're dead.””

“There was supervised recreation. This is the original contradiction of terms. It was for making suggestions about supervised recreation that the devil was cast into hell; any other account you have heard is false.””

“The historian Cassiodorus believed that the selective destruction of Alaric, as regards the Greek monuments, was of good effect. Alaric had some taste and was awed by really great art. The Greeks were only human, and all their work could not have been excellent. But almost all their ancient work that survived the ravages of Alaric was of unsurpassed excellence.There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands. There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of the Gothic Greek adventure; not in Athens, or Megara or Corinth or Argos. Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art.It is said that Alaric destroyed half of the art of Greece. It may have been the worst half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness.””

“But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.””

“Alien monsters were pleasant and funny. One early and almost forgotten piece of history tells that Adam, in addition to naming all the sub-lunar creatures, also named the nine hundred and ninety-nine species of creatures who had their homes and nests above the moon, on other moons or trabants or asteroids or planets. And after they were named, the super-lunary creatures went back to their own places, with friendly memories of Earth, the ‘naming place’. So we do have nine hundred and ninety-nine alien species, monstrous but friendly, waiting to meet us again.””

“I finally saw the whole conspiracy standing as plain as an elephant in the street; also the conspiracy was admitted to me in great detail by one of the princes of the conspiracy." "Bad, Smith, very bad." "If one of the inmates should come to you right now, Doctor, and tell you it was raining outside, you'd say 'Bad, very bad', and make damning marks on his record." " That's probably true. It's an automatic response with me.””

“Per­fec­tion is nearly al­ways im­possible, but it is never dif­fi­cult. Which is to say that if there is any dif­fi­culty to it, any lack of ease, then it has already failed of per­fec­tion. All per­fect things are easy. But they are not fre­quent.The mar­ried life of Charles Peis­son and Dotty was per­fect. From the mo­ment that Charles re­turned to town, everything was per­fect. The mark of per­fec­tion is its very sim­pli­city. Charles had a knack for un­ty­ing knots, for resolv­ing dif­fi­culties. The knack does not con­sist of ig­nor­ing the dif­fi­culties nor in skirt­ing them. It doesn’t even con­sist of fa­cing them and con­quer­ing them in the old copy-book fash­ion, though ap­par­ently they are faced and conquered in an­other fash­ion. Or some of them are never conquered at all. Part of the idea is just not to be dif­fi­cult about dif­fi­culties.If the rest of the idea were un­der­stood, then every­one would have per­fec­tion; and they do not.””

“Paul was coursing at fantastic speed towards the area where the little twin stars Rhium and Antirhium revolved around each other. “Hurry,” were his instructions; “they seem of no consequence, but they are the governor of the universe. Somebody is tampering with them.” Paul continued at his impossible speed and arrived at the area. He saw something that nobody had ever seen before, for nobody had ever been so close to them. The two small stars that revolved around each other were, joined together by a long steel chain. It was that which held them in their tight rapid orbits; it was that which made them the governor of the universe. Paul quickly located the trouble. There was a small green creature, with the body of .a monkey and the head of a gargoyle, cutting the chain with a hack-saw, and he had it near cut in two. “Pray that I be not too late!”Paul prayed, and he believed he had made it when the sawyer-broke a blade. But he quickly replaced it with another, stuck his green tongue out at Paul, took three more strokes with the hack-saw, and the chain broke. Then Rhium and Antirhium swung out of their tight orbits, and the whole universe was out of control with its governor broken. Fifty billion billion stars went nova, and then blacked out to nothing. The universe had eaten itself and was gone forever. “I told you to hurry!” the space captain told Paul furiously as he came barreling up. Then the space captain’s face melted like wax and he was gone. “I did hurry,” Paul said. Then his own face melted like wax and he was gone also.“Is it quite finished?” came the voice of old hawk-face Fabian Foreman. “If it is quite finished, then perhaps we can begin to construct a new universe. It’s all right. It worked out well. I meant you to be too late.””