K.W. Jeter > Quotes

“Over the vistas broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed in vain hope and desire... If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually, morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever.”
― K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night

“What is the future going to be like, then?'

'Hey, it's gonna be a gas,' Scape assured me. 'If you're into machines and stuff - like I am - you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey - in the Future, everybody will want to!”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“There are two things without limit – the stupidity of Man and the mercy of God.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.”
― K.W. Jeter

“Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ Herr Doktor Pavel”
― K.W. Jeter, Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables

“Life's nothing but the beating you take before you die. And I've died so many times already. Killed and lost so much. The remains.”
― K.W. Jeter, Dr. Adder

“If you are connected you're fucked.”
― K.W. Jeter

“I had always thought myself to be a man of moderate passions indistinguishable in that respect from most Englishmen born to our logical and mannered times.”
― K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night

“He turned away from me, the better to hide the exclamation of annoyance which he muttered under his breath; I caught only what seemed to be the syllable cog (perhaps a reference to my mechanical trade) and the word succour (a prayer for divine assistance?).”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“I believe it " announced Tafe complacently.

"That my dear " said Ambrose "is because you grew up in a rough and violent world here just managing to live from day to day is easily considered a miracle. You are able to accept the truth no matter how astonishing its guise. Whereas our friend Hocker here is steeped in the overweening rationalism of his time and could mentally dismiss a mastodon in front of him if it happened to be wearing the wrong school tie.”
― K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night

“Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.”
― K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night

“It's one thing to face great odds, but even the smallest struggle, if undertaken without hope, looms and swells with the fatal poisons of despair.”
― K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night

“Creff, my factotum, interrupted the breakfast he had brought me only a few minutes earlier and announced that a crazed Ethiope was at the door, presumably to buy a watch.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“Why would the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It's simple. Machines don't suffer. They aren't capable of it. A machine doesn't know when it's being raped.
There's no power relationship between you and a machine. That's been the U.N.'s whole pitch about the attractions of the off-world colonies all along. The big human thrill. For a replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions.”
― K.W. Jeter, Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human

“Creff was visibly agitated by the stranger's appearance at our door. Memory calls to mind the anxious wringing of his hands, resembling two furless pink badgers wrestling for each other's throats...”
― K.W. Jeter

“To retrieve the past is no great effort, when the events to be recalled are so firmly imprinted on the mind. It is existence in the present, the bleak wreckage and residue of what has gone before, that is so burdensome.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“I beg you to read no further.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“Distruggere qualcosa è il modo migliore d'imparare.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“...in an area such as this the possibility of violence for the sake of robbery or even mere amusement is always something to be reckoned with. Our little expeditionary party had tried to dress as plainly as possible, but our great-cloaks simply by their cleanliness attracted the sinister attention of the loiterers on the street.”
― K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night

“Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“I like commas.”
― K.W. Jeter, THE NIGHT MAN

“Considering how the Imperial storm troopers usually make up in numbers what they lack in marksmanship—I'd say I've got the advantage”
― K.W. Jeter, Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars Trilogy

“[...]; soon the day would come, if not already arrived, in which the privilege of being in any way disconnected from the rest of Humanity would be reserved only for the wealthy, who can purchase with their riches the isolation and quiet denied to us mere rabble.”
― K.W. Jeter, Grim Expectations

“Though I myself have come to this safe harbour – if safety can be found in this life – yet I mourn my former simple days. I have lost my Innocence, in more ways than one. I have seen the gears and furious machinery of the world that lies unreckoned beneath our feet. No longer can I note, as other men do, the passing hours upon the heavens' gilded face, without a vision of a hidden master-spring uncoiling to its final silence. I await the day when all clocks shall stop, including the one that ticks within my breast. Do thou the same, Reader, and profit from my example.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“Kom’rk tsad droten troch nyn ures adenn, Dha Werda Verda a’den tratu.”
― K.W. Jeter, Slave Ship

“She felt as if she were being sucked dry by little vampires. End up like one of those pruney leather guys you see scuttling around downtown, she thought. That's part of the price you pay for coming to work in L.A. - The Glass Hammer”
― K.W. Jeter