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Riverworld
Copyright © 1966 by U.P.D. Publishing Corporation
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| II | “I thought that law and order and religion, to be maintained, needed torture and persecution. Yet I was often sickened. So when I found myself in a new world, I determined to start anew. What had been right and necessary on Earth did not have to be so here.” | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Feb 2005 | ||
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To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Copyright © 1971 by Philip José Farmer
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| 15 | “Welcome to the concentration camp, Burton! This is your first taste of it. It’s an old tale to me, one I was tired of hearing from the beginning. I was in a Nazi camp, and I escaped. I was in a Russian camp, and I escaped. In Israel, I was captured by Arabs, and I escaped. “So, now, perhaps I can escape again. But to what? To another camp? There seems to be no end to them.” | |
| 17 |
“Principles must never be abandoned,” Spruce said evenly. “The end never justifies the means. Even if clinging to them means defeat, death, and remaining in ignorance.” | Topic: |
| 24 |
Time did not mean much on The River. The planet had a polar axis that was always at ninety degrees to the ecliptic. There was no change of seasons, and the stars seemed to jostle each other and made identification of individual luminaries or of constellations impossible. So many and so bright were they that even the noonday sun at its zenith could not entirely dim the greatest of them. Like ghosts reluctant to retreat before daylight, they hovered in the burning air. Nevertheless, man needs time as a fish needs water. If he does not have it, he will invent it; so to Burton, it was July 14, 5 A.R. | Topic: |
| Collop was genuine; he was not stoking the furnace of his sweetness with leaves from a book or pages from a theology. He did not operate under forced draft. He burned with a flame that fed on his own being, and this being was love. Love even for the unloveable, the rarest and most difficult species of love. | ||
text checked (see note) Feb 2005 | ||
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The Fabulous Riverboat
Copyright © 1971 by Philip José Farmer | ||
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| 7 | He wanted to sleep but could not. Insomnia had been skewering him for years; it drove through the middle of his brain, which spun on it like a wild gear, disengaged from his body’s need for rest. | Topic: |
| 8 | “Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise.” | Topic: |
| “A humorist is a man whose soul is black, black, but who turns his curdles of darkness into explosions of light. But when the light dies out, the black returns.” | Topic: | |
| 9 |
Rationality had nothing to do with true logic; man was an irrational animal, acting strictly in accordance with his natal temperament and the stimuli to which he was peculiarly sensitive. So why do I torture myself with things that cannot be my fault because I cannot help my responses? | Topic: |
| 13 | “I’m from Missouri,” Sam replied, “but I never was much of a mule trader. However, if you’re running for your life, a pack of wolves snapping at your heels, you’ll trade a foundered plug for a wild mustang, as long as he’ll carry you out of danger. You worry later about how to get down off of him without breaking your neck.” | |
| 15 | He loved beauty and nature’s order and he loved the parklike arrangement of the valley, whatever else he thought about this world. Now he had made it hideous because he had a dream. And he would have to extend that hideousness, because his mills and factories needed more wood for fuel, for paper, for charcoal. | |
| 17 | “It’s a nice toy and makes a lot of noise and looks impressive and will kill a man. But it’s wasteful and inefficient.” “You make it sound like a Congressman,” Sam said. | |
| 22 | “John,” Sam said, “I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support.” | |
| [...] “I hate that man! He tells the truth!” | Topic: | |
| 23 | Did he believe in mechanical determinism because he wanted to not feel guilty, or did he feel guilty, even though he should not, because the mechanical universe determined that he should feel guilty? | |
| 28 | Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate. | |
text checked (see note) Feb 2005 | ||