Alexei Panshin > Quotes

“Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“If I had the opportunity, I would make the proposal that no man should be killed except by somebody who knows him well enough for the act to have impact. No death should be like nose blowing. Death is important enough that it should affect the person who causes it.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“A book isn't a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a different story.
A few years ago, for instance, a friend of my mother's sent me a copy of a test on Rite of Passage that she had given her students. The first question read: "True or False? The theme of Rite of Passage is..." I can't tell you what the presumed themed was, but I can tell you that I didn't recognize it. Beads of sweat leaped out of my forehead. After two more questions, I had to put the test aside. I didn't know the "right" answers.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Night is irregular. What is not done in the daytime becomes possible at night: murder and sex and thought.
Simple men are driven to early beds by tomorrow's daytime demands and by fear of the dark, and never dream of the irregular world outside. And all the while, a viscount and a spaceport baggage boy might be passing the night rolling bok ball in the city park. That's more than unusual -- that is irregular.”
― Alexei Panshin, The Thurb Revolution

“If you read Rite of Passage and enjoy yourself, I couldn't be more pleased. I hope it gets you of.
On the other hand, if you should be assigned Rite of Passage, and you start to read it and it doesn't work for you, just put it aside and forget the whole thing. Tell the teacher I said it was okay. Okay?”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“There is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is a real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow LOOKS right.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“It was, if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Everybody should espouse three or four harmless crank theories for the pure pleasure of having something harmless to be cranky about. And when a theory of this sort proves correct, it is a true moment for celebration.”
― Alexei Panshin, The Thurb Revolution

“I want to make it clear before we begin that I think your purpose is to learn and mine is to help you to learn, or to make you learn, though I doubt either of you has to be made. I have very little interest in writing out progress reports on you, or sticking to form charts, or anything else that interferes with our basic purposes. If there is anything you want to learn and have the necessary background to handle, I'll be ready to help you whether or not it is something that formally falls among the things I'm supposed to teach you. If you don't have the background, I'll help you get it. In return, I want you to do something for me. It's been many years since I was last a tutor, so I expect you to point out to me when I fail to observe some ritual that Mr. Quince holds essential. Fair enough?”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“I don't like the idea of people who don't sing to themselves when they're all alone. They're too sober for me. At least hum-- anybody can do that.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn't true, would you hit him or smile? That's how easy it is to tell.”
― Alexei Panshin, The Thurb Revolution

“If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn't, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those "mature" people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don't smile much.
Nominalists have more fun. They are known as Aristotle or Decimus-et-Ultimus Barziza, or as Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montague, or perhaps by one name in childhood and several others in the course of life.
A firm Realist misses out on one of the most satisfying of all human activities -- the assumption of secret identities. A man who has lived and never been someone else has never lived.
It is true that occasionally there can be embarrassment in secret identities, but only a Realist will take the whole thing seriously enough to hit you. So have your fun, and avoid Realists.”
― Alexei Panshin, The Thurb Revolution

“The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me.
It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a spear carrier in somebody else’s story. A spear carrier is somebody who stands in the hall when Caesar passes, comes to attention, and thumps his spear. A spear carrier is the anonymous character cut down by the hero as he advances to save the menaced heroine. A spear carrier is a character put in a story to be used like a piece of disposable tissue. In a story, spear carriers never suddenly assert themselves by throwing their spears aside and saying, “I resign. I don’t want to be used.” They are there to be used, either for atmosphere or as minor obstacles in the path of the hero. The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers. We take no joy in being used and discarded. I was finding then, that wet, chilly, unhappy night, that I took no joy in seeing other people used and discarded.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“It gave me time to think about my character deficiencies. I didn’t think of them in those terms, but I did determine not to be any more stupid than was absolutely necessary, which is much the same thing.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were *right* and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a huddled heap and puke. It would probably disrupt the concept of heroics for all time. — from Rite of Passage”
― Alexei Panshin

“The rest of our weekend sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand-prepared food was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“I didn’t want to go forward—I didn’t like what I saw there. But I couldn’t go back, either, because I tried that and it didn’t work. And you can’t spend your life on a tightrope.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage