Philip José Farmer

Rouged green lips part like a gangrened wound.

Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.

even killed a man, though it had been more by accident than skill. But he was an ineffectual warrior. In battle the valves of his heart were turned full open, and his strength poured out.

So here you are near the end of the world, savages, beings who, given the time, would build up a great civilization again. You don't have the time, and the long, long story, the many-eons tale of humankind, will end. For what reason? I don't know. The universe, looked at logically, is, despite all its intricate order and irresistible physical principles, senseless.

Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

I seldom lie,' he said.

I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

The plant-man said, ‘I’ve observed that when a human is dealing with another, he’s usually logical only if he’s advancing his self-interests or has a desire to hurt or put down the other. Is this one of those situations?

It was doubtful that their technology, and its intelligent use, would ever match their ability to create social stupidities.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

A gray-pink salmon leaping up the falls of night
Into the spawning pool of another day.

Dawn-the red roar of the heliac bull
Charging over the horizon.

The photonic blood of bleeding night,
Stabbed by the assassin sun.

It is no idle phrase that man was made in God's image. There is something worth saving in the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be fashioned.

These people who expect to be saints in heaven, though they were not on Earth, have ignored the wisdom of the founders of the great religions. This wisdom is that the kingdom of heaven is within you and that you do not go to heaven unless you are already in it. The magic must be wrought by you and you alone. God has no fairy wand to tap the pig and turn it into a swan.

People ignore this. And those who believe in sinners burning in hell are, perhaps, not so much concerned with going to heaven as with being sure that sinners-–others-–roast forever in the flames.

I'm a queer crabbed old man, pent like Merlin in his tree trunk. Samolxis, the Thracian bear god, hibernating in his cave. The Last of the Seven Sleepers.

First, humiliation, then humility, he would have said. And then comes humanity as a matter of course.