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Henry Kuttner

47 quotes

“All these things were slipping away from him, in a clear, cold wisdom that came from beyond the stars. He envisioned man as a bit of animate clay moving fro a little while upon a ball of mud and stone and water that drifted through the void, through the darkness that would finally engulf it.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Citadel of Darkness, in L. Sprague de Camp (ed.), Swords & Sorcery (Pyramid Books R-950, 1963), p. 84. Originally published in Strange Stories, August 1939
“When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stephen Court in The Creature from Beyond Infinity (1940)
“We are all part of some cosmic pattern, and this pattern works toward good and not evil. It builds and does not destroy. So I shall go on in my search for a race where I can find kinship and happiness.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ardath in The Creature from Beyond Infinity (1940)
“Counsel will continue,” said the judge, wishing he were Jeffreys so he could send the whole damned bunch to the scaffold. Jurisprudence should be founded on justice, and not be a three-dimensional chess game. But, of course, it was the natural development of the complicated political and economic factors of modern civilization.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time Locker, originally published in the January 1943 issue of Astounding; reprinted in The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, , pp. 32-33
“The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed. Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life....”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Valley Of The Flame (1946), published using the pseudonym "Keith Hammond.
“We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Janissa, in The Valley Of The Flame (1946), published using the pseudonym "Keith Hammond.
“In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a dagger's blow or a strangler's hands.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. "For," he thought, "a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtar's hand saved me, one never knows." Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stars glittered frostily overhead, unconcerned with the fate of Atlantis — stars that would be shining thousands of years hence when Atlantis was not even a memory.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is almost wholly a matter of fashion; what is beautiful today would have been grotesque a couple of generations ago and will be grotesque a hundred years ahead. It will be worse than grotesque; it will be outmoded and therefore faintly ridiculous.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could be as jittery as you if I wanted to. But I've studied history and literature. And architecture, and a lot of things. Just to balance this psycho work. There’s a lot more perfection in a Doric column than in you.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a scientifically trained observer sees a gun go off for the first time, he should be able—theoretically, anyway—to work out a formula for gunpowder.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He did not even try, for fear of succeeding. What could he say? “Disarm. Seek peace. Hammer your swords into ploughshares.” And suppose they did? The enemy would strike again—and succeed, against an unprepared nation.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Eden the trouble began. And even after that, Cain slew Abel. In every Paradise, there have been wars. But in the Polar cold, in the Sahara, in all inhospitable lands where men wrench a dangerous living from the hostile elements, there is comradeship in unity against the Enemy older than man, the universe in which he dwells.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oddly enough—” And here the devil sighed. “Oddly enough, those who make bargains with me never do have the capability to use their gifts. I suppose only inferior minds expect to get something for nothing. Yours is distinctly inferior.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The words. I couldn’t understand the words. The only means of communication, and they are a deadly barrier.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We grew up in a commercial world and how can we tell what’s real, now?”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then I knew that the last test of sanity had failed me, for it was no longer possible to tell the unreal from the real. The last test fails when the illusion moves into life itself and you can touch and feel and handle the commercial vision as if she were the real woman. There was no defense any more.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is a false synonym for propagation, as the soul is a wish fulfillment creation growing out of self-preservation.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Devil You Know (originally published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction, August 1941), p. 67
“Man has the hardest job of all, the job of making decisions on incomplete data.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The two girls looked at one another, caught in the terrible, helpless problem of immaturity, the knowledge that the mores of the adult world are too complicated to understand, and that children must walk warily. Adults are always right. They are an alien race.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And adults will recognize a mirage; a child will be deceived. But conversely, an intellectual mirage will deceive an adult, not a child.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was suffering the first pains of maturity’s burden, the knowledge of responsibility misused.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was rather difficult to think of a duel seriously, even though everyone else did, when the details of the barbecue dinner were prosaic in his mind. So it went. The tides of civilization rolled in century-long waves across the continents, and each particular wave, though conscious of its participation in the tide, nevertheless was more preoccupied with dinner.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man had a bad temper, and if people kicked him around, he asked for it by starting the kicking himself.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The social problems were far tougher than technological ones, because the human basics remained unaltered, and people don’t change as fast as things.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People don’t change, they just grow older. But fads and gadgets and trivia alter fast, even to the point of becoming unrecognizable.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Harding was elected because he promised normalcy. After war, men were tired. They wanted to crawl back into a 1912 womb. They didn’t want experiments that might upset their lives further.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People seem to like new things—if they weren’t too new, if they didn’t seem to point the way to Change.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Forbid them to sing it.” But the minister’s voice was dubious. “Ja, but can they be forbidden to think it? They always think of what is verboten. They can’t help it. It’s a basic human instinct.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole thing never happened and I can prove it — now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story. So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever — forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space — on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end. From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor. And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Ea — which I shall never be able to describe fully. I saw it, though. I saw it...”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, the Big Ride. You start when you’re born. You climb on the toboggan and then you’re off. But you can only have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-taker you want to go again. They shovel you under at the end of the slope and there’s a new lot of passengers waiting. You’ve had your three-score and ten. And it’s over.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The race moves on. It has its human limitations. The tools we make have no limitations at all. When we educate ourselves to learn to handle those tools most efficiently we can go on to the next step, whatever it may be. Meanwhile there must be check and balance—rigid control.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This isn't my world, now. Not any more. Not the world I left. This is a world in which no nekronic flash leaped from a box that Ira De Kalb opened and dropped to his hearthstone to infect the world, De Kalb and me. All that did happen once, in another world that hasn't existed since the four of us, a doubled weapon wielded by the Face of Ea, wrought the cleaving apart of two universes. Imponderable forces shifted when that cleavage took place. You and I know nothing about it, for it happened far beyond the perceptions of any sentient creature. But it happened. Oh yes, it happened.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm going forward. I know — because I went. It was a wonderful world they had. I want to see more of it. I want to wake up in a time when the race of man is spreading through the galaxy, leaping across the gulfs between the stars, opening the gates to all the worlds. I want to and I will.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me...”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a sword," I said. "A sword that is — is not quite a sword as we think of weapons. My mind is cloudy there still. But I know that Ghast Rhymi can tell me where it is. A weapon, yet not a weapon. The Sword Called Llyr.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her hands came out of her sleeves. There was a rod of blinding silver in each. Before I could stir she had brought the rods together, crossing them before her smiling face. At the intersection forces of tremendous power blazed into an instant's being, forces that streamed from the poles of the world and could touch only for the beat of a second if that world were not to be shaken into fragments. I felt the building reel below me. I felt the gateway open.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A casual eye might have seen nothing extraordinary in Wade as he moved lithely across the meadow toward the Thunderbug. He was tall, lean and rangy, looking rather like a college boy on a vacation, with his brown, almost youthful face and tousled dark hair, so deep-black that it was almost blue. A closer inspection would have shown more significant details. There was an iron hardness underlying Wade’s face, like iron beneath velvet. His jet eyes were decidedly not those of a boy. There was a curious quality of soft depth to them, although sometimes that black deep could freeze over with deadly purpose.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the character "Thunder Jim Wade" in "The Poison People" in Thrilling Adventures (July 1941) using the pseudonym "Charles Stoddard.
“Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came — but from whence I do not know — and civilizations arose. … These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas. . . .”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They dare'd not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. … This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn't pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room" — Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors — "in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough — more than enough — to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon's breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features. "Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?" "A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny — and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand.”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe in things I never used to. I think someone is trying to find me — has found me. And is calling. Who it is I don't know. What they want I don't know. But a little while ago I found out one more thing — this sword." I picked the sword up from the table. "It isn't what I want," I went on, "But sometimes, when my mind is — abstract, something from outside floats into it. Like the need for a sword. And not any sword — just one. I don't know what the sword looks like, but I'd know if I held it in my hand." I laughed a little. "And if I drew it a few inches from the sheath, I could put out that fire up there as if I'd blown on it like a candleflame. And if I drew the sword all the way out — the world would come to an end!”
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source