C.L. Moore > Quotes

“The explorers and the drifters and the spacehands are misfits mostly, and, therefore, men of imagination. The contrast between the rigid functionalism inside a spaceship and the immeasurable glories outside is too great not to have a name. So whenever you stand in a ship’s control room and look out into the bottomless dark where the blinding planets turn and the stars swim motionless in space, you are taking a walk down Paradise Street.”
― C.L. Moore, Judgment Night

“He shook his head at the bright world in the sky. He would have to get over the habit of regarding the heavens as a chart with a glittering pinhead for each planet, and so many thousand Thresholders, ex-Earth-born, bred for the ecology of alien worlds, pinned up there upon the black velvet backdrop for study and control. It wasn’t his problem any more.”
― C.L. Moore, Judgment Night

“This was what the loss of civilization really meant. For the first time the full impact of the Galaxy’s great loss overwhelmed her. So long as she could see those lost worlds she might hope to win them back, but to be struck blind like this was to lose them forever. She knew a sudden agony of homesickness for all the planets she might never see again, a sudden terrible nostalgia for the lost, familiar worlds, for the fathomless seas of space between them. Ericon’s eternal greenness was hateful, strangling in its tiny limitations.”
― C.L. Moore, Judgment Night

“...[R]ead a great deal of the works you enjoy most. Much of it will be useless. But the trusty unconscious can be relied on to make lots of unseen notes, just in case.”
― C.L. Moore

“Ruthlessly a child can destroy the pretenses of an adult. Iconoclasm is their prerogative.”
― C.L. Moore, Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943

“He was staring into a greater dark that held all things.. .He had known - dimly he had known when he first gazed into those flat animal shallows that behind them lay this - beauty and terror, all horror and delight, in the infinite darkness upon her eyes opened like windows, paned with emerald glass.”
― C.L. Moore, Shambleau

“He knew it from the moment he looked into her eyes, and a shiver of unrest went over him as he met them. They were frankly green as young grass, with slit-like, feline pupils that pulsed unceasingly, and there was a look of dark, animal wisdom in their depths - that look of the beast which sees more than man.”
― C.L. Moore, Shambleau

“From the standpoint of logic, a child is rather horribly perfect. A baby may be even more perfect, but so alien to an adult that only superficial standards of comparison apply. The thought processes of an infant are completely unimaginable. But babies think, even before birth. In the womb they move and sleep, not entirely through instinct. We are conditioned to react rather peculiarly to the idea that a nearly-viable embryo may think. We are surprised, shocked into laughter, and repelled. Nothing human is alien.

But a baby is not human. An embryo is far less human.”
― C.L. Moore, Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943

“Those ceaselessly pulsing pupils disturbed him, but it seemed to him, vaguely, that behind the animal shallows of her gaze was a shutter - a closed barrier that might at any moment open to reveal the very deeps of that dark knowledge he sensed there.”
― C.L. Moore, Shambleau

“She might have been a little afraid at other times, but that steady flame of hatred burning behind her eyes was a torch to light the way,”
― C.L. Moore, The Best of C.L. Moore

“It was a motley crowd, Earthmen and Martians and a sprinkling of Venusian swampmen and strange, nameless denizens of unnamed planets- a typical Lakkdarol mob.”
― C.L. Moore, Northwest of Earth

“It’s extraordinary,” Macduff mused, looking pensively at Ess Pu. “They feel fine only when they’re hating someone.”
― C.L. Moore, The Best of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

“The sensations of pleasure and pain are reversed. Algolians find the emotions of rage, hate and cruelty pro-survival. A lamentable state of affairs.”
― C.L. Moore, The Best of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

“Smith's errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith's living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by ray-gun only.”
― C.L. Moore, Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith

“It is our purpose to attempt a reversal of this woman's physical and mental self in such a way as to cause her body to become rigidly motionless while her mind—her soul—looks eternally backward along the path it has traveled. You who are human, or have known humanity, will understand what deadly torture this can be. For no human creature, by the laws that govern it, can have led a life whose intimate review is anything but pain.”
― C.L. Moore, Jirel of Joiry