Damon Knight > Quotes

“It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths shut about the past: but tell me, what are our reasons for silence about atrocities still to come?”
― Damon Knight, One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

“During the four days of the storm, I became accustomed to the soft light of lamps and candles and grew to like it. When the power came on again, I discovered that I was actually disappointed. The electric lights seemed cold and impersonal; they revealed too much.”
― Damon Knight, One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

“...There is no such thing as a story. The words on paper are only instructions used by each reader to create a story. The story itself exists in the reader's mind and nowhere else. And it is different for each reader, because no two people have the same experience, background, training, interests, and so on.”
― Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction

“There are more riddles in a stone than in a philosopher's head”
― Damon Knight, Far Out

“In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the corner. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the pont of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky?”
― Damon Knight, One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

“We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.”
― Damon Knight

“Sturgeon’s definition of science fiction—“[a story] which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”
― Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder

“If you are miserable and ill, I can understand why you would not want to live a long time. But if you are happy and productive, why not? Why should people have to grow old and die?”
― Damon Knight, One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

“By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead.”
― Damon Knight, One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

“A retired bank vice-president named Harry Breitfeller, who lived in a comfortable duplex in Santa Monica with his wife and other relatives, stepped out on the cement porch a little after nine one morning to pick up the mail. There were half a dozen envelopes, mostly bills, in the mailbox, and a whacking big cardboard carton on the porch under it. Breitfeller picked up the carton, thinking it must be something his wife had ordered, but saw that his own name was on the label.”
― Damon Knight, A for Anything

“Science Fiction is what I point to and say "That's science fiction.”
― Damon Knight

“THIS HAPPPENED, not in 312 A.D., but in August, 1971. A retired bank vice-president named Harry Breitfeller, who lived in a comfortable duplex in Santa Monica with his wife and other relatives, stepped out on the cement porch a little after nine one morning to pick up the mail. There were half a dozen envelopes, mostly bills, in the mailbox, and a whacking big cardboard carton on the porch under it. Breitfeller picked up the carton, thinking it must be something his wife had ordered, but saw that his own name was on the label. There was no return address. According to the postmark, the box had been mailed late the previous afternoon in Clear-water, which is about 34 miles northeast of Los Angeles.”
― Damon Knight, A for Anything