Quotes from Brian W. Aldiss

Time doesn't pass. That's just a human myth. Time's all round us, like some kind of jelly. It's just human life that passes.

Sadness is just happiness in reverse. We humans have to put up with it. Just being human is an awful burden to bear.

Nor could she frame deeper words herself; human understandings trickled shallow these days. It was the way.

They would tear the wiltmilt to living pieces until nothing of it remained—and if they happened on a human at the same time … well, it was the way.

Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again.

Each wave was the only wave.

Family must rely upon family, since governments do not comprehend families.

Others spoke piously since, being old, they could follow no course but virtue.

A woman needs fatalism more than a man. A woman's role in life is to listen, and when I listen I never hear anything but the howl of the wind. I prefer the sound of my own voice.

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

To read is to strike a blow for culture

Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.

This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us!

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

I feel happy or sad. I love people. Therefore I am human. Isn't that so?

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Life on the big slope was endurable, and sometimes more than just endurable, for the human spirit was a genius for making mountains out of molehills of happiness.

It's a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity.

Laintal Ay, you also have an inwardness to your nature. I feel it. That inwardness will distress you, yet it gives you life, it is life.

Evil is loose in the world. I have to go." "I don't believe in evil. Mistakes, yes. Not evil." "Then perhaps you are afraid to believe it exists. It exists wherever men are. It

On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free—free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way. But

I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn't I?

Violence was regarded as an acceptable solution to many problems which would never have originated had violence not been in the air in the first place.