Theodore Sturgeon > Quotes

“90% of everything is crap.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose? ”
― Theodore Sturgeon, E Pluribus Unicorn

“There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, E Pluribus Unicorn

“Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?”
“It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X

“Live long and prosper”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Amok Time

“Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone."
"Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone."
He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“Nothing is always absolutely so”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love."
"He says only if you love yourself.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“Ask the next question.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume IX: And Now the News...

“I never read a book in my life,” she said again. She looked at the volume where it lay by the boulder, at Scott, at the book again. She seemed to be having a great deal of trouble getting used to the idea of a man reading a book. “What do you read books for?”
Now he laughed, and she flared up at him, “You laughing at me?”
“Lord, no, ma’am. It’s just that nobody ever asked me that before.”
He looked at the still water for a moment, thinking. “Tell you what, suppose you had a friend, he knew a whole lot more than you do. He could tell you things about what people are like all over the world, the way they live, everything. And what folks were like a hundred years ago or even a thousand. He could tell you things that make your hair curl, lose you sleep, or things that make you laugh.” He looked up at her swiftly, and away. “Or cry.”
He kicked a pebble into the water and watched the sunlight break and break, and heal. “More than that. Suppose you had a friend there waiting for you anytime you wanted him, anyplace. He’d give you all he’s got or any part of it, whenever you wanted it. And even more, you could shut him up if you didn’t feel like listening. Or if he said something you like, you could get him to say it over a hundred times, and he’d never mind.”
He pointed at the book. “And all that you can put in your pocket.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume X: The Man Who Lost the Sea

“The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“There was such a rush about me: wing, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.

I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, E Pluribus Unicorn

“It was spring, the part of spring where the bursting is done, the held-in pressures of desiccated sap-veins and gum-sealed buds are gone, and all the world’s in a rush to be beautiful.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belongs to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, E Pluribus Unicorn

“Love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God

“Evelyn said, "What's it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?"
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. "Love," she said at length. She swallowed. "It's a madness. It's bad.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Sturgeon is Alive and Well

“Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“This is the answer!
The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving.
The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing.
The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go.
The answer is not in covering and hiding, but in touching and sharing.
The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling.
The answer is not in death, but love.
Not death, but life.
Not death!”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Godbody

“I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.

In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.

("The Graveyard Reader")”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Weird Shadows From Beyond: An Anthology of Strange Stories

“Living things aren't finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known - these things are still at work in them; nothing's finished.

("The Graveyard Reader")”
― Theodore Sturgeon, Weird Shadows From Beyond: An Anthology of Strange Stories