Quotes from Jack Finney

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

Maybe I live in what is for me the wrong time.

I went up a straight crooked lane and, I said 'No thanks, yes if yer please.

When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.

I saw my father's wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they'd been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust.

I wrapped his pistol in his cap, and with the butt of the gun—not the end of the butt, but the side—hit him hard on the head. You read a lot about people being hit on the head and knocked out, but you don't read much about blood clots in the brain. In actual fact, though, it's a delicate matter, hitting a man on the head

Maybe the new one would actually know how to write, instead of beating his head against a stone wall just trying.

It seems to me that it's usually impossible to get hold of another time. You look at a pair of high-button shoes, the leather dry and cracked, buttons missing, the cloth uppers nearly drained of color by the years, and it just isn't possible to get into the mind of some long-gone woman who once saw them new. How could they ever have been new and shining, something a woman might actually covet?

Graustark novels

If I dreamed, no traces remained in my memory; I simply left the world and life for complete exhausted oblivion.

And to live even a few seconds longer, [...] was infinitely better than to die a moment earlier

and—we're all actors by instinct, hams from birth—she

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.

The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer.

Maybe I live in what is for me the wrong time.

It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.

As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there.

If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.

Would you have references?" "I'm awfully sorry but I haven't. I just arrived in New York, and don't know a soul. Except you." I smiled but she didn't smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, "It's true that I'm an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I'm neat.

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.

Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it's your function, your reason for being. There's no other reason, and none needed.

The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe—from sub-atomic particles to the universe—except itself.

Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well.