Leigh Brackett quotes

Leigh Brackett was an American author, screenwriter, and prominent figure in science fiction. Her imaginative stories and screenplays have had a lasting influence on both literature and film, including work on “The Empire Strikes Back.” She is often called the "Queen of Space Opera" and is celebrated for her powerful storytelling. Here are 22 of her quotes:

Under the attentiveness was fear, and something else. Anger, hate-the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth.

Leigh Brackett

The Thyrans came on, as merciless as time.

Leigh Brackett

Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it.

Leigh Brackett

The man who doesn't fear, doesn't live long. I fear everything.

Leigh Brackett

With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. Not that he did not believe in luck. Rather, he had found it to be an uncertain ally.

Leigh Brackett

Invisibility is a condition of godhead. If folk could see them, they would know the truth, and the Lords Protector would cease to be divine.

Leigh Brackett

You can't destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.

Leigh Brackett

There's never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn't think he was fully justified. That's a mental trick called rationalizing, and it's done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.

Leigh Brackett

"Better to make haste slowly than not at all,” said Amnir sententiously.

Leigh Brackett

There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close, frightening small of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well.

Leigh Brackett

Stark said wearily, "I don't think you understand.” Normally he was tolerant of tribal fancies, but he felt no great tenderness for the Outdwellers. "The stars are already defiled. They're only suns, like that one over your head. They have worlds around them, like this one under your feet. People live on those worlds, people who never heard of Outdwellers or their footling goddess. And the starships fly between them. It's all going on out there, this second as you stand here, and nothing you can do will stop it.”.

Leigh Brackett

Stark did not like them. There was a touch of madness in them, born of the long dark and the too-long-held faith.

Leigh Brackett

Aren't you even curious?” he asked. "A million worlds out there with more wonders than I could tell you in a million years, and you don't even want to ask a question?

Leigh Brackett

I can't tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove.

Leigh Brackett

I am finished with running. Now I will stop and choose my way. Sooner or later a man has to stop and choose his way, not out of the ways he would like there to be, or the ways there ought to be, but out of the ways there are.

Leigh Brackett

No matter which way I go I know now that I will never have peace. For peace is certainty, and there is no certainty but death.

Leigh Brackett

Was he trying to frighten you?

Leigh Brackett

I guess we've got a lot to learn.

Leigh Brackett

Two writers living and working together, even if they do not collaborate, will inevitably influence each other's work, in one way or another. Ed always knew the last line of a story before he wrote the first one, and every line he wrote aimed straight at that target.

Leigh Brackett