Henry Kuttner

"The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed. Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life...."

"When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build."

"Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. "For," he thought, "a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtars hand saved me, one never knows." Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so."

"We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here."

"In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a daggers blow or a stranglers hands."

"“Counsel will continue,” said the judge, wishing he were Jeffreys so he could send the whole damned bunch to the scaffold. Jurisprudence should be founded on justice, and not be a three-dimensional chess game. But, of course, it was the natural development of the complicated political and economic factors of modern civilization."

"Beauty is almost wholly a matter of fashion; what is beautiful today would have been grotesque a couple of generations ago and will be grotesque a hundred years ahead. It will be worse than grotesque; it will be outmoded and therefore faintly ridiculous."

"They dared not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. … This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadnt pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room" — Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors — "in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough — more than enough — to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagons breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis."

"I could be as jittery as you if I wanted to. But Ive studied history and literature. And architecture, and a lot of things. Just to balance this psycho work. There’s a lot more perfection in a Doric column than in you."

"In Eden the trouble began. And even after that, Cain slew Abel. In every Paradise, there have been wars. But in the Polar cold, in the Sahara, in all inhospitable lands where men wrench a dangerous living from the hostile elements, there is comradeship in unity against the Enemy older than man, the universe in which he dwells."

"Man has the hardest job of all, the job of making decisions on incomplete data."

"All these things were slipping away from him, in a clear, cold wisdom that came from beyond the stars. He envisioned man as a bit of animate clay moving fro a little while upon a ball of mud and stone and water that drifted through the void, through the darkness that would finally engulf it."