Algis Budrys > Quotes

“Perhaps it's the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle's burrow? Does the beetle understand why it is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a straight line? Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it — or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it? It would be best for the beetle to study the can in terms of the can's logic, to the limit of the beetle's ability. In that way, at least, the beetle can proceed intelligently. It may even grasp some hint of the can's maker. Any other approach is either folly or madness.”
― Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

“I have to have time to think. Why does time run on while a man thinks?”
― Algis Budrys

“When you play the past over and over in your head, you can begin to see things in it that you missed when you were living it. You come to realize that there were moments when one word said differently, or one thing done at just the right time, would have changed everything.”
― Algis Budrys, Who?

“I made a discovery. It was cold enough to make my eyes water, and I found out that If I kept them almost closed, the moisture diffused the lights, so that everything - the Moon, the stars, the street lamp - seemed to have halos and points of scattered light around it. The snow-banks seemed to glitter like a sea of spun sugar, and all the stars were woven together by a lace of incandescence, so that I was walking through a Universe so wild, so wonderful that my heart nearly broke with its beauty.

"For years, I carried that time and place in mind. It's still there. But the thing is, the Universe didn't make it. I did. I saw it, but I saw it because I made myself see it. I took the stars, which are distant suns, and the night, which is the Earth's shadow, and the snow, which is water undergoing a state-change, and I took the tears in my eyes, and I made a wonderland. No one else has ever been able to see it. No one else has ever been able to go there. Not even I can ever return to it physically, it lies thirty-eight years in the past, in the eye-level perspective of a child, its stereoscopic accuracy based on the separation between the eyes of a child. In only one place does it actually exist. In my mind Elizabeth - in my life.

"But I will die, and where will it be, then?"

Elizabeth looked up at him. "In mind mind a little? Along with the rest of you?"

Hawks looked at her. He reached out and, bending forward as tenderly as a child receiving a snowflake to hold, gently enclosed her in his arms. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," he said. "I never realized that. I never realized what you were letting me do."

"I love you.”
― Algis Budrys

“No matter how many times you stir up a steaming pile of crap, it’s still just a steaming pile of crap.”
― Algis Budrys

“It’s no longer Colonel Norwood’s time. The dead must not rise – they undermine everything their dying created. Resurrecting Norwood is an attempt to cancel history. I can’t allow that, any more than any other human being would. And so all of this is a challenge to me. I was concerned that it might be a deliberate trap.”
― Algis Budrys, Michaelmas

“I want someone to just hold me and not think about me being a woman. I just want to feel warm, for once in my life – just have another human being near me!”
― Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

“Death is in the nature of the universe, Barker. Death is only the operation of a mechanism. All the universe has been running down from the moment of its creation. Did you expect a machine to care what it acted upon? Death is like sunlight or a falling star; they don't care where they fall.”
― Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

“A story that needs to have words said about it, is a story that does not contain all its own right words.

-- Introduction to Varley's "Persistence Of Vision" collection”
― Algis Budrys