Fritz Leiber quotes

Fritz Leiber was an American writer renowned for his contributions to fantasy, horror, and science fiction literature. His works, including the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, have had a lasting influence on modern speculative fiction. He helped shape the sword and sorcery subgenre and is celebrated for his imaginative storytelling. Here are 91 of his quotes:

There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.

Fritz Leiber

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Fritz Leiber

Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

Fritz Leiber

Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.

Fritz Leiber

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

Fritz Leiber

I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!

Fritz Leiber

Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

Fritz Leiber

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?

Fritz Leiber

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.

Fritz Leiber

Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse.

Fritz Leiber

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

Fritz Leiber

Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery.

Fritz Leiber

There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren't the worst.

Fritz Leiber

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence - liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

Fritz Leiber

The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That's why they're the gods! I told you they were devils.

Fritz Leiber

Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. "They are unreal.” "They're as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. "And they merely mean conscience.

Fritz Leiber

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

Fritz Leiber

Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.

Fritz Leiber

I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.

Fritz Leiber

It's this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos - and don't tell me that isn't in the cards! - masquerading as benign omniscient authority.

Fritz Leiber

I realized that wherever she came from, whatever shaped her, she's the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She's the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She's the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She's the creature you give everything for and never really get. She's the being that takes everything you've got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She's the lure. She's the bait. She's the Girl.

Fritz Leiber

Poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.

Fritz Leiber