Jack Williamson Quotes

I have a vast curiosity about our universe, our origins, and its probable future.

Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within.

[Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.

Perhaps that was just a hunch."

Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it.

That dim sense had been useful to him - on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade's grave.

Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason.

I'm afraid Dr. Mondrick chose an unfortunate publicity device. After all, the theory of human evolution is no longer front page news. Every known detail of the origin of mankind is extremely important to such a specialist as Dr. Mondrick, but it doesn't interest the man in the street - not unless it's dramatized.

Your danger is something other than death, and uglier. Because she will try to change you - to arouse something in you that should never be awakened.

Her long body stiffened against him. Her cool fingers tightened in his shaggy fur, and her bare, clinging heels dug deep into his heaving flanks. She was sweet against him, and the clear logic of this new life conquered the dreary conventions of that old, dim existence where he had walked in bitter death.

With the vague hope that it might somehow explain his dream, he took one of his old textbooks from the shelves and tried to read the chapter on lycanthropy. The book cataloged the queerly universal primitive beliefs that human beings could change into dangerous carnivorous animals. He skimmed the list of human wolves and bears and jaguars, human tigers and alligators and sharks, human cats and human leopards and human hyenas. The were-tigers of Malaysia, he read, were believed invulnerable in the transformed

Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be the monstrous Child of Night.

supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell." The dark man smiled. "For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It's my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.

Sleep pressed upon him with an urgency that became resistless. And April Bell was calling to him. Her voice came clearly to him, above all the subdued murmur of traffic noises. It was a ringing golden chime, more penetrating than the occasional beep of a driver's horn or the far clamor of a streetcar. It shimmered out of the dark, in waves of pure light as green as her malachite eyes. Then he thought he could see her, somehow, far across the slumberous town. Only she wasn't a woman.

And there would come up from the sea its voice; and the sea has no voice, but mysteriously touches the strings within the soul of a man, so that the soul speaks in its own way, each soul lifting its peculiar message.

witch. A being born a little different, he preferred to phrase it. He remembered reading something about the Rhine experiments, at Duke University. Some people, those sober scientists had proved, perceived the world with something beyond the ordinary physical senses. Some people, they had demonstrated, displayed a direct control over probability, without the use of any physical agency.

was still afraid - not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself.

That was quite an adventure, stopping at a different house each night, seeing new country,.

I'm a strict materialist - but the police are brutal materialists.

We're never quite so powerful as we feel, in this free state," she whispered in the rushing wind. "Because our usual bodies are left behind, and our moving mind complexes can draw only upon the chance energies that they happen to grasp from the atoms of the air or other substances we possess, by the linkage of probability. All our power lies in that control of probability, and we must strike where it will serve.