Edgar Pangborn Quotes (1909-1976)

“One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.”

““Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.””

“One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.”

“Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves?”

“Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim.”

“One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests.”

“You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it.”

“At one point early in his journal Dr. Bannerman describes himself as “a naturalist of the puttering type—I would rather sit on a log then write monographs: it pays off better.””

“In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it.”

““I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.”
“If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.””

“She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking.”

“I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love.”

“Never, beautiful Earth, never even at the height of the human storms have I forgotten you, my planet Earth, your forests and your fields, your oceans, the serenity of your mountains; the meadows, the continuing rivers, the incorruptible promise of returning spring.”

“A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves.”