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James Blish Quotes (1921-1975)
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About James Blish
James Benjamin Blish (May 23, 1921 – July 30, 1975) was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling Jr.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful James Blish quotes.
“I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do.”
“Munitions and magic are circles that don’t intersect very effectively.”
“Sam was too good a scientist to let that hope creep into his hypothesizing.”
“The first thing a psychologist learns is to keep her mouth shut around laymen.”
“The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five months later, I’ve proved it.”
“It isn’t every composer who can premier his own last opera posthumously.”
“In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!”
“One thing you learn fast in the munitions business is that it’s a very good idea to stay off battlefields.”
“No exercise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than marginally better than who we are.”
“Martel still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences.”
“He wore the expression of a man who has heard all this before, and is not enjoying it any better the second time.”
““We hear you, Father,” he said surprisingly. “Yet we sense that though what you say is the truth, it is not the whole truth.””
“Of course a sense of guilt has a threshold; at a certain level of intensity it begins to confirm the habit-pattern rather than inhibit it—”
“He had been greatly talented once, but the loss of gifted experimenters to administrative posts was the curse of all research organizations.”
“We often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is described as n-dimensional—it’s like modern sex, any number may be played with.”
“The subject was complex enough to nurture family splits as rancorous and as final as the theological hairsplitting which had been the bane of other ages.”
“He was getting to be a little old for combat or for princesses, but what was worse, he had become a lot more cynical without having become even slightly the wiser.”
“Telepathy and intelligence appear to be incompatible from the evolutionary point of view—if you’ve got one, you don’t seem to need the other, and they may even be evolutionary enemies.”
“In his opinion, neither justice nor mercy were very closely related to love, let alone being identical with it—otherwise, why have three words instead of one? A metaphor is not a tautology.”
James Blish Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of James Blish quotes by topic.
James Blish on Libraries
“I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do.”
James Blish on Fact
James Blish on Science
“Sam was too good a scientist to let that hope creep into his hypothesizing.”
James Blish on Existence of God
“They had all been things, not people, to each other, which after all is the only sensible and fruitful attitude in a thing-dominated world. (Except, of course, for Father Domenico, whose desire to prevent anybody from accomplishing anything, chiefly by wringing his hands, had to be written off as the typical, incomprehensible attitude of the mystic—a howling anachronism in the modern world, and predictably ineffectual.) And in point of fact none of them—not even Father Domenico—could fairly be said to have failed. Instead, they had all been betrayed. Their plans and operations had all depended implicitly upon the existence of God—even Jack, who had entered Positano as an atheist, had been reluctantly forced to grant that—and in the final pinch, He had turned out to have been not around any more after all. If this shambles was anyone’s fault, it was His.”
About James Blish
James Benjamin Blish (May 23, 1921 – July 30, 1975) was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling Jr.