Quotes from More Than Human

“Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone."
"Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone."
He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love."
"He says only if you love yourself.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“It was spring, the part of spring where the bursting is done, the held-in pressures of desiccated sap-veins and gum-sealed buds are gone, and all the world’s in a rush to be beautiful.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Evelyn said, "What's it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?"
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. "Love," she said at length. She swallowed. "It's a madness. It's bad.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“I got to my feet and looked around the room. Just a room, only the one door. I tiptoed towards it. When I passed Janie, she opened her eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered.

‘None of your business,’ I told her. I went to the door as if I didn’t care, but I watched her. She didn’t do anything. The door was as solid tight closed as when I’d tried it before.

I went back to Janie. She just looked up at me. She wasn’t scared. I told her, ‘I got to go to the john.'

’‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why’n’t you say so?’

'Suddenly I grunted and grabbed my guts. The feeling I had I can’t begin to talk about. I acted as if it was a pain, but it wasn’t. It was like nothing else that ever happened to me before. Something went splop on the snow outside.'

‘Okay,’ Janie said. ‘Go on back to bed.'

‘But I got to – ’

'You got to what?'

’Nothing.’ It was true. I didn’t have to go no place.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“He had an animal's maturity, in which the play of kittens and puppies no longer has a function. His spectrum lay between terror and contentment.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“He picked up three long fresh stalks of timothy and braided them together. He upended the scythe and thrust the handle deep enough into the soft earth so it would stand upright. He tied the braided grass to one of the grips and slipped the whetstone into the loops so it would stay. Then he walked off into the woods.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“He is credited with inventing the story of Spock’s sex life, as well as the famous Vulcan greeting, “Live long and prosper,” and (with Leonard Nimoy) its accompanying hand signal.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was alone. Why should he have let himself feel any other way?”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

“Wrong. Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist... the idea that such as he could belong to anything.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from More Than Human

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“The Keoughs were wonderful neighbors,” he said. “It’s true that occasionally Don would mention that, unlike me, he had a job, but the relationship was terrific. One time my wife, Susie, went over and did the proverbial Midwestern bit of asking to borrow a cup of sugar, and Don’s wife, Mickie, gave her a whole sack. When I heard about that, I decided to go over to the Keoughs’ that night myself. I said to Don, ‘Why don’t you give me twenty-five thousand dollars for the partnership to invest?’ And the Keough family stiffened a little bit at that point, and I was rejected. “I came back sometime later and asked for the ten thousand dollars Clarke referred to and got a similar result. But I wasn’t proud. So I returned at a later time and asked for five thousand dollars. And at that point, I got rejected again. “So one night, in the summer of 1962, I started heading over to the Keough house. I don’t know whether I would have dropped it to twenty-five hundred dollars or not, but by the time I got to the Keough household, the whole place was dark, silent. There wasn’t a thing to see. But I knew what was going on. I knew that Don and Mickie were hiding upstairs, so I didn’t leave. “I rang that doorbell. I knocked. Nothing happened. But Don and Mickie were upstairs, and it was pitch-black. “Too dark to read, and too early to go to sleep. And I remember that day as if it were yesterday. That was June twenty-first, 1962. “Clarke, when were you born?” “March twenty-first, 1963.” “It’s little things like that that history turns on. So you should be glad they didn’t give me the ten thousand dollars.”
― Alice Schroeder, quote from The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“here at last there was a fitting object for those remarkable powers which, like all special gifts, become irksome to their owner when they are not in use. That razor brain blunted and rusted with inaction.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Valley of Fear

“Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Joke

“There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn't help and it's because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations.”
― Frank McCourt, quote from Teacher Man

“Forgiveness must be initiated before life can begin.”
― Asa Don Brown, quote from Waiting to Live

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