Cordwainer Smith > Quotes

“We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“Joan commented, upon sentence, "My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“... but remember that I shall love your sorrow...”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.”
― Cordwainer Smith

“She is a cat," he thought. "That's all she is—a cat!"
But that was not how his mind saw her—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding.
Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?”
― Cordwainer Smith

“... crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“It was not the site of the earth which surprised him – it was the smell. .... This earth and air smelled alive. There was the odor of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. .... It was the wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance which no Norstrilian could understand. No wonder the descriptions of the earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated!”
― Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia

“Great beliefs always come out of the sewers of cities, not out of the towers of the ziggurats.”
― Cordwainer Smith

“And now if they should break or you should fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over: that's the pack on your back.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Lady Who Sailed the Soul

“Water does nothing yet it penetrates everything. Inaction finds the road.”
― Cordwainer Smith

“Love is not proud. Love has no real name. Love is for life itself, and we have life.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“I myself went into a hospital and came out French.”
― Cordwainer Smith, Alpha Ralpha Boulevard

“There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Crawlie was as dangerous as a human enemy, staring at Elaine, her beautiful face gone bland with hidden hate.”
― Cordwainer Smith, La Dama muerta de Clown Town

“She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“The rest of the evening moved with the inevitability of good music.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Lady Who Sailed the Soul

“Chang nodded sagely. “My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up-and-out, and what we did there, but it did not matter. He said, ‘Airplanes were good enough for Confucius, and they are for me too.’ The old humbug!”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Meeya Meefla, where”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“You are Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-first. Specifically, you are a spinal column with a small bone box at one end, the head, and with reproductive equipment at the other end. Inside the bone box you have a small portion of material which resembles stiff, bloody lard. With that you think—you think better than I do, even though I have over five hundred million synaptic connections. You are a wonderful object, Rod McBan. I can understand what you are made of. I cannot share your human, animal side of life.”
― Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia

“You and I are animals, darling, not even real people, but people do not understand the teaching of Joan, that whatever seems human is human.”
― Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia

“If you have not seen Norstrilia, you have not seen it. If you did see it, you would not believe it. If you had arrived there, you would not leave alive.”
― Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia

“It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium—metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of Old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the burn and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an air-carried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“At sixteen Helen was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Surely I am me. There must be a me more than the beauty of my face, there must be a something other than the delicacy of skin and the accidental lines of my jaw and cheekbone. What have men loved if it wasn't me? Can I ever find out who I am or what I am if I don't let beauty perish and live on in whatever flesh age gives me?”
― Cordwainer Smith

“That’s no answer!’ snapped Elaine.
‘It is so an answer,’ smiled the woman, and her lack of hostility was not robotlike at all. It was the kindliness and composure of a mature human being. She looked up into Elaine’s eyes and spoke emphatically and softly.”
― Cordwainer Smith, La Dama muerta de Clown Town

“He was a man, in short, who had arranged his own life to live comfortably, selfishly, and well on the personal side, so that he could give generously and impartially of his talents on the official side.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Ballad of Lost C'mell

“There is no all-​purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty pounds. You do.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith - Cordwainer Smith

“Sun-boy was acting out religion before the age of space. He chorused hymns, he lifted his eyes and his hands and his piece of the congohelium to the sun; he played the rattle of whirling dervishes, the temple bells of the Man on the Two Pieces of Wood and the other temple bells of that saint who had escaped time simply by seeing it and stepping out of it. Buddha, was that his name?”
― Cordwainer Smith

“she knew full well that people carry their secret biographies written in the muscles of their faces, and that a stranger passing on the street tells us (whether he wishes to or not) all his inmost intimacies. If we but look sharply enough, and in the right light, we know whether fear or hope or amusement has tallied the hours of his days, we divine the sources and outcome of his most secret sensuous pleasures, we catch the dim but persistent reflections of those other people who have left the imprints of their personalities on him in turn.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith