Quotes from Gateway

Frederik Pohl ·  278 pages

Rating: (33.9K votes)


“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“You asked me, 'Do you call this living?" And I answer: Yes, it is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway



“She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


“Only you have to keep practicing and remembering.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway



“Es extremadamente listo, considerando lo estúpido que es.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway


About the author

Frederik Pohl
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date November 26, 1919
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Popular quotes

“What was the point of having a man if all he could do was turn his back and sleep? Not that she wanted him to do anything else, but in a way it was an insult. The turned back reminded her of all the various backs that had not been turned. Which was a depressing thought, because it meant she was beginning to live in the past.

Backs That Were Never Turned. The Reminisces of Maria Delaney...No, it was not depressing. It was funny.”
― Daphne du Maurier, quote from The Parasites


“At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year


“Happily, as you are not my husband, I do not have to give your opinion more attention than I choose,” I snapped. “Good day, Mr. Hargreaves.”
― Tasha Alexander, quote from And Only to Deceive


“Falco readers are, I must say, the most strikingly nice group of people.”
― Lindsey Davis, quote from The Silver Pigs


“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.”
― Samuel Butler, quote from The Way of All Flesh


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