Brian Aldiss Quotes
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'Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?' The bear shuffled its alternatives. 'Real things are good.' 'I wonder if time is good. I don't think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?'
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'You and I are real, Teddy, aren't we?' The bear's eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. 'You and I are real, David.' It specialized in comfort.
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An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.
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I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete.
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If adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it!
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One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF.
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When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.
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The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.
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In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.
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He had the settled expression of a certain kind of peasant-the kind that accepts, with protest but without malice, the vagaries of life. It is the gift life sends to compensate for the lack of a high I.Q.
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I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.
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In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.
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If you think with your emotions, slight glandular changes are sufficient to revise your entire outlook.
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'I'm no good, Teddy. Let's run away!''You're a very good boy. Your Mummy loves you.'Slowly, he shook his head. 'If she loved me, then why can't I talk to her?''You're being silly, David. Mummy's lonely. That's why she had you.''She's got Daddy. I've got nobody 'cept you, and I'm lonely.'
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'The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?''More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.'
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As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, 'Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.'
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Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world.
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It’s the duty of men in office not to be misled.
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What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?
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Never, never let action become a substitute for thought.
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That’s one thing about these religious boys-they reckon that if they are on God’s side, then the enemy must be on the devil’s, and so they have no qualms about giving it to ’em hot and strong.
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Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?
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Jagger had gone through there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed.… Somewhere that wasn't the house.…
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'Sounds to me as if you want journalists,' Timberlane said.'No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it’s a way of life.'