Quotes from John Collier

Young people who need a love potion very seldom have five thousand dollars. If they had they would not need a love potion.

I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.

Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")

Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.

This morning I had not so much as carfare. Now I am here, on velvet. You are itching to learn of this haven; you would like to organize trips here, spoil it, send your relations-in-law, perhaps even come yourself. After all, this journal will hardly fall into your hands till I am dead. I'll tell you. I am at Bracey's Giant Emporium, as happy as a mouse in the middle of an immense cheese, and the world shall know me no more.

My eyes were trying to tell me something that my brain refused to believe. They made their point. I was looking straight into another pair of eyes, human eyes, but large, flat, luminous. I have seen such eyes among the nocturnal creatures, which creep out under the artificial blue moonlight in the zoo.

I nipped into this sanctuary late this afternoon and soon heard the dying footfalls of closing time. From now on, my only effort will be to dodge the night watchman. Poets can dodge.

How happy I might be, if only she was less greedy, better tempered, not addicted to raking up old grudges, more affectionate, with slightly yellower hair, slimmer, and about twenty years younger! But what is the good of expecting such a woman to reform?

Their laughter was like the stridulation of the ghosts of grasshoppers.

Franklin Fletcher dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forgo the tiger-skins. Unfortunately the beautiful women seemed equally rare and inaccessible. At his office and at his boarding-house the girls were mere mice, or cattish, or kittenish, or had insufficiently read the advertisements.

And she gave him a melting smile, the glutinous sweetness of which he devoured with the avidity of a diabetic who swallows a fatal spoonful of jam.

She will want to know all you do," said the old man. "All that has happened to you during the day. Every word of it. She will want to know what you are thinking about, why you smile suddenly, why you are looking sad." "That is love!" cried Alan.

There are some young almond tress, which ordinarily look as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the white bone of the brittle bright night.

Just behind his jaw bones a tiny movement was perceptible, like the movement of gills in a fish.