Canopus in Argos Quotes
Science fiction books, American novels
Top Quotes
“Wikipedia: Canopus in Argos”
“It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.”
“This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.”
“For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa, watching the stars "Well," he would say, "if we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we came from!"”
“What a phenomenon it has been — science fiction, space fiction — exploding out of nowhere, unexpectedly of course, as always happens when the human mind is being forced to expand; this time starwards, galaxy-wise, and who knows where next.”
“So that this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been finite, bounded, known utterly and in every detail, self-enclosed ... but now it lapped and rippled out and upwards beyond there into hinterlands that were like unknown possibilities in her own mind.”
“What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.”
“There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone Three, and from us, up the pass. There was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers. For this is how we all see it now.”
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?"”
“This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them.”
“It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people? — or animals? — even forests or oceans or rocks? — in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.”
“In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living — in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?”
“Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of — even — the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness — what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent — these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered.”
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
“But what these had been, our peoples, our selves — were with us then, were us, had become us — could not be anything but us, their representatives — and we, together, the Representative, at last found the pole that was the extremity of our old planet, the dark cold pole that had been built, once, to guide in the space-fleets of Canopus, when they visited us. There we left that planet, and came to where we are now. We, the Representative, many and one, came here, where Canopus tends and guards and instructs.”
“In fact, it is no longer possible for them to think of war except in terms of uniforms. This mental set now infects every aspect of their lives. There is a certain type of covering for the lower limbs, in thick, unyielding cloth, always of the same color, and very tight, emphasizing the buttocks and the genitals. It is not only worn in every corner of the "Empire," but has spread to the near planets of Sirius as well. A young person who for some reason or another does not own this garment will regard himself or herself as an outcast, and will be so regarded by others.”
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
“Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it: we "make things up." This is our trade. I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.”
“Anyone could clutch at a child and mark its features: "This nose is mine, and that his, and that my mother's, and that his father's ..." Anybody, even a horse or a dog, could calculate streams of inheritance in that way. And all that was pleasant enough, and of course no one would refuse the delights of watching for the appearance of this or that trait in a child. But that was not even the half of it ... one might not, most definitely could not, say of a child, "mine, mine," or "ours, ours," — meaning, only, parenthood. For what was real and fine and precious in this new being was in relation only with ... somewhere else ...”