James Blish

"“The motto of the bureau,” Weinbaum said, “is, ‘sometimes something works.’"

"Martel still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences."

"Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be t…"

"In his opinion, neither justice nor mercy were very closely related to love, let alone being identical with it—otherwise, why have three words instead of one? A metaphor is not a tautology."

"In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!"

"We cannot count upon the secret being kept. It’s a fact of nature, and as somebody or other remarked long ago, Nature is a blabbermouth; ask the right question, and you’ll always get the answer."

"Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we call motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to sme…"

"He was getting to be a little old for combat or for princesses, but what was worse, he had become a lot more cynical without having become even slightly the wiser."