Quotes from George Alec Effinger

Being good and sweet in this life is enough to attract evil

my philosophy of raising kids is kind of extreme. I think you should keep a baby around for a few days after it's born—until the novelty wears off—and then you put it in a big cardboard box with all the best books of Eastern and Western civilization. Then you bury the box and dig it up again when the kid's eighteen.

I hadn't heard such a ridiculous piece of sophistry since the days when the old shaykh who lived in a box in our alley in Algiers tried to prove that the entire Earth was flat because the city of Mecca was flat. Which it isn't.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.

They introduce some new technology and no matter how much good it does for most people, there's always a crazy son of a bitch who'll find something twisted to do with it.

there's so goddamn much history, it just can't help repeating itself.

it is the nature of religions to put a higher premium on your proper attention to ritual than on your convenience.

was much easier to deal with hassles while they're still in the yellow-alert stage.

The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I'd long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out.

Months of torment, relieved at the end by a single minute of good cheer. What more could anyone want?

He had enough troubles, he thought, without inventing new ones for the future. He was middling lost, starving, and with an excellent chance of never returning to the house alive. Floods and earthquakes and plagues of locusts were rather unnecessary.

She would have made a great lizard, basking on a hot rock in the sun.

I rolled over and faced the cracked green wall. I regretted that simple action immediately; it had felt like a slow-motion film with every other frame missing.