Philip José Farmer

“ Rastignac quit his limited roving and called up to the guard.
"Shoo l'footyay, kal u ay tee?"
The guard leaned over the grille. His large hat with its tall wings sticking from the peak was green in the daytime. But now, illuminated only by a far off torchlight and by a glowworm coiled around the band, it was black.
"Ah, shoo Zhaw-Zhawk W'stenyek," he said, loudly. "What time is it? What do you care what time it is?" And he concluded with the stock phrase of the jailer, unchanged through millenia and over light-years. "You're not going any place, are you?" ”

“ Jane, who had been getting more tense with every word, became rigid. Would he allow this to be done to his own son, his own flesh and blood? Would he permit his child to become a half-robot, an obedient slave to the State, incapable in certain fields of wielding the power of free will? The factor that most marked men from the beasts and the machine? ”

“ It was as if the sky were an upside-down sea out of which dived a thousand bodies, plunging earthward head foremost.
A shout of rapture swelled from the ground to meet them. The dead Truncated were descending from Heaven to crown the faithful living!
But there was one man who did not scream with joy. He was B. T. Revanche, clad in a white robe and showing a nose from which the plastiflesh had been removed. He was there because he had insisted to Da Vincelleo that he could not get his money's worth unless he actually participated.
"You can't taste blood over a TV set," he had growled. ”

“ I'm wounded! But am I like them? Am I one of the halt, the lame, the blind? Am I like that detective who swells himself into a gross human balloon because he stuffs the growing void of his hurt with food?
"Am I like our hostess, whose green wound caused her to drive away two husbands because it festered so deep she went into a delirium of unfounded imaginings about them? And then got a third who fulfilled the image she'd built up of the first two?
"And am I like that thin-lipped woman who deep-freezes her wound because she is mortally afraid of pain? ”

“ Jack saw all this just before the veil took on another shade of red and blurred completely his vision of the outside. But the final thickening did not keep him from seeing that Doctor Eumenes was staring down at him as if he were peering into a dusky burrow. And Jack could make out the eyes. They were large, much larger than they should have been at the speed with which Jack was receding. They were not the pale pink of an albino's. They were black from corner to corner and built of a dozen or so hexagons whose edges caught the light. ”

“ And we can tell them of the Earth that was, so they will know how to build the Earth that must be."
"Two hundred years?" said Broward. "We won't be the same persons then."
But he doubted that even the centuries could change Scone. The man was made of rock. He would not bend or flow. And then Broward felt sorry for him. Scone would be a fossil, a true stone man, a petrified hero. Stone had its time and its uses. But leather also had its time.
"We'll never get back unless we do today's work every day," said Scone. "I'll worry about Earth when it's time to worry. Let's go; we've work to do." ”

“ Revanche whispered.
He knew, of course, that the statue could not hear him. But by timing his questions to correspond with its disk-recorded utterances an illusion of conversation could be maintained. To imagine even for a brief instant that he could bend so lovely a creature to his will brought out all of the latent sadism in his nature.
"I'm not interested in you as a work of art, baby," he said. "I guess you know that."
"Pass on, man of culture," the statue said. "You linger too long here. If you look about you, you will find others more beautiful than I!" ”

“ She knew I'd be so upset, I'd forget my violin case. For, as I stood fretting before the elevator door, she stepped into the hall and called, "Lover!"
I turned—then I screamed, "No! No!" I backed away, my hands spread despairingly before me.
No use. The bow she'd taken from my case strummed. The arrow struck me in the heart....
Later, when I tried to explain to Mother, I found myself forced to defend myself against her contention that I had wanted the mortal to wound me, that I was putting my own selfish desires above my duties to her and our profession. ”

“ Suddenly he was falling, hurtling helplessly and sickeningly through a void while a cold and drab blast gouged his skin and spun him around and around. The world he had always known shoved hard against him. Again he felt the blow in the solar plexus and saw the grey tentacles of the living reality reach for his heart.
Jack looked up at the stranger, who was just about to put his spectacles on the bridge of his long nose. His eyelids were closed. Jack never did see the pink eyes. ”

“ I have not yet shed the blood of any being that can talk with the tongue of Man."
Rastignac snorted and said, "If you stick with me you will some day do that, m'fweh Mapfarity. There is no other course. It is inevitable."
"Nature spare me the day! But if it comes it will find Mapfarity unafraid. They do not call me Giant for nothing."
Rastignac sighed and walked ahead. Sometimes he wondered if the members of his underground—or anybody else for that matter—ever realized the grim conclusions formed by the Philosophy of Violence. ”

“ When I found out what they were doing, my nerves quivered. Both had built shells! One was glass; the other, cellulose!
"What do you think you're doing? Aren't you afraid of the olfway?"
"Pulse away, old grouch. Nothing's the matter with us. We're just ready for winter and mating-heat, that's all. We'll be Mothers, then, and you'll still be growing your big old shell. Where'll your prestige be? The others won't even pulse with you 'cause you'll still be a virgin and a half-shelled one at that!" ”

“ The arrogance with which B. T. Revanche strode through the outer office of Bioid Electronic was enough to convince anyone that he was a V.V.I.P. His weasel eyes straying neither to left nor right, long fat cigar stabbed straight ahead, quill-like hair bristling in all directions, he was a stout little porcupine of a man. And like that spear-backed creature, he knew that no one would stop him. If they did, they'd regret it—so help them!
Very few people ever paced so fearlessly through the waiting rooms of Bioid. ”

“ The glow-light fell upon it in such a way that it showed plainly the webbing of skin between her fingers. He glanced at it with a faint repulsion under which was a counter-current of attraction. This was the hand that had, indirectly, shed blood.
She glanced at him sidewise, challenged him in trembling tones. "You are not one to throw stones, Jean-Jacques. I have heard that you eat meat."
"Fish, not meat. That is part of my Philosophy of Violence," he retorted. "I maintain that one of the reasons man is losing his power and strength is that he has so long been upon a vegetable diet. ”

“ And do I behave as some of these women here who throw themselves at every man who might give temporary healing, all the while knowing deep within them that the wound will become more poisonous?
"Is it my fault if most of these people don't cultivate their wounds, if they grow sickly and twisted and ill-smelling plants from them instead of the lovely and colorful and sweet flower that grows in me?" ”