Quotes from James Blish

She was right. Peace was the way. She was right. But at the wrong time.

T]he end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary...

The boundary between the real and the unreal had been let down in Foote's mind, and between the comings and goings of the cloud-shadows and the dark errands of the ghosts there was no longer any way of making a selection. He had entered the cobwebby borderland between the human and the animal, where nothing is ever more than half true, and only as much as half true for the moment. ("There Shall Be No Darkness")

I for one refuse to believe that an enterprise so well conceived, so scrupulously produced, and so widely loved can stay boneyarded for long. And I have 1,898 letters from people who don't believe it either.

The omelette tasted like flannel.

I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we'll find that there's nothing there at all—just nothings moving no-place through no-time. On the day that that happens, I'll have God and you will not—otherwise there'll be no difference between us.

Let us unlearn everything we know only by rote, go back to the beginning, learn all over again.

When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight....

I've spoken the truth. The truth can't be unsaid.

H]er spare strange beauty was not that of a woman, nor even of a statue, but that of the Platonic absolute of which all beauty is but a shadow in a cave, cast by the Fire beyond fire.

There is wanting the unobtainable, and there is the obtaining of desire, and the greatest of these is the wanting, especially since the object of desire usually exists only in some alternate reality, to be mocked by actuality.

We inhabit two universes, then, One is the universe inside our skulls - our viewpoint universe, as it were.

A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.

They seemed greatly concerned for our safety - so concerned that they wanted to brain us.

Maybe God is on the side of the werewolves.

Credit . . . is the only enduring testimonial to man's confidence in man.