Philip José Farmer
76 quotes
Biography
Philip José Farmer was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.
"Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got."
"Liquor’s good for one thing. It makes you forget what you’re afraid not to forget."
"The real heroes, and heroines, are those who deal heroically with the everyday cares of life, though God knows they’ve been multiplied enormously. It’s not the guy who kills a dragon once in his lifetime and then retires that’s a hero. It's the guy who kills cockroaches and rats every day, day after day, and doesn't rest on his laurels until he’s an old man, if then."
"Zeitgeist rides tonight, and the devil take the hindmost!"
"Yesterday's monomaniac is tomorrow's messiah…"
"Strong blasphemers thrive only when strong believers thrive."
"In a frenzy, kicking his legs and moving his arms in a swimmer's breaststroke, he managed to fight toward the rod. The closer he got to it, the stronger the web of force became. He did not give up. If he did, he would be back where he had been and without enough strength to begin fighting again. It was not his nature to give up until all his strength had been expended."
"The aerial canoe had no visible means of support, he thought, and it was a measure of his terror that he did not even think about his pun. No visible means of support. Like a magical vessel out of The Thousand and One Nights."
"All the human beings I met were either sure that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get preferential treatment in the hereafter."
"Burton did not believe in miracles. Nothing happened that could not be explained by physical principles — if you knew all the facts."
"Burton, though an infidel, made it his business to investigate thoroughly every religion. Know a man’s faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half."
"Burton sighed, laughed loudly, and said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Another fairy tale to give men hope. The old religions have been discredited — although some refuse to face even that fact — so new ones must be invented.”"
"Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows."
"A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion."
"Of course, I’m only indulging in mankind’s vice of trying to make a symbol out of coincidence."
"But we may not be able to climb high enough. Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise."
"Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build a beautiful boat."
"It was not that he was unintelligent. It was just that he was not emotionally able to comprehend democracy."
"Actors didn’t have to be politicians, but politicians had to be actors."
"His thinking wasn’t logical. But whatever the philosophers claimed, the main use of logic was to justify your emotions."
"I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support."
"He was stiff and sometimes a little strange, which was what you’d expect from an engineer, but he had a moral backbone as inflexible as a fossilized dinosaur’s."
"Styles was an old Mississippi pilot, a handsome youth, no liar, though given to inflating facts."
"Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate."
"Dreams haunted The Riverworld."