Theodore Sturgeon

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.

Had I been screaming, screaming, in some way? I with my life so separate and well-ordered in the company of my green things and my sky and the animals of the hillside? I shouted - it was a demand - I shouted and shook him: "Godbody!" And as usual he understood me perfectly: 'You was lonesome,' he said.

Does anyone ask a painter -- even the painter himself -- why he paints? Now me, I painted... used to... whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I've always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I'm crossing it late.("To Here and the Easel", 1954)

The patrists poison themselves. The matrists tend to decay, which is merely another kind of poison.

Why do you talk all the time?_ I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully.__ think it__ __ause I don__ know any big words, like you and Mummy,_ she said, just in time to pull me out of my magazine again, __o I have to use lots and lots of little ones.

I thumped her on the back, picked her up and dropped her on top of her dungarees. __ut them pants on,_ I said, __nd be a man._ She did, but she cried quietly until I shook her and said gently, __top it now. I didn__ carry on like that when I was a little girl._ I got into my clothes and dumped her into the bow of the canoe and shoved off.All the way back to the cabin I forced her to play one of our pet games. I would say something__nything__nd she would try to say something that rhymed with it. Then it would be her turn. She had an extraordinary rhythmic sense, and an excellent ear.I started off with __e__l go home and eat our dinners.___n_ Lord have mercy on us sinners,_ she cried. Then, __et__ see you find a rhyme for __onth_!___ bet I__l do it _ jutht thith onthe,_ I replied. __ guess I did it then, by cracky.___ourse you did, but then you__e wacky. Top that, mister funny-lookin_!__ pretended I couldn__, mainly because I couldn__, and she soundly kicked my shin as a penance. By the time we reached the cabin she was her usual self, and I found myself envying the resilience of youth. And she earned my undying respect by saying nothing to Anjy about the afternoon__ events, even when Anjy looked us over and said, __ust look at you two filthy kids! What have you been doing__wimming in the bayou?___addy splashed me,_ said Patty promptly.__nd you had to splash him back. Why did he splash you?__ __ause I spit mud through my teeth at him to make him mad,_ said my outrageous child.__atty!___ea culpa,_ I said, hanging my head. _ __was I who spit the mud.__njy threw up her hands. __eaven knows what sort of a woman Patty__ going to grow up to be,_ she said, half angrily.__ broad-minded and forgiving one like her lovely mother,_ I said quickly.__ice work, bud,_ said Patty.Anjy laughed. __utnumbered again. Come in and feed the face.

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me.

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

Writing is a communication.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Reality isn__ the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we__e engineered for it. It__ a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can__ 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.

I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.("The Graveyard Reader")

Living things aren't finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known - these things are still at work in them; nothing's finished.("The Graveyard Reader")

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.

Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.

Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?_ __t's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?

The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth.___hat__ mining,_ said the Drip. __here is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.