Leigh Brackett Quotes

Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned.

No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try.

There's never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn't think he was fully justified. That's a mental trick called rationalizing, and it's done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.

You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.

Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.

If you're not honest with yourself, life will never be honest with you.

No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.

As long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob will turn cruel.

He said they were afraid, and that fear makes stupid people do wicked things,

Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life.

Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweet butter and contemplating a sin.

Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor — closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes.

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals, but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance.

Whether it was the stimulus of the radio, or simply that he was growing up, or both, he saw everything about him in a new way, as though he had managed to get a little distance off so that his sight wasn’t blurred by being too close.

Girls without Pasts don't keep guns in their dressing rooms.

Change is always a sorry thing,

I will not be cleansed of knowledge. Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it. And

I will speak to them,' he said 'with a straight tongue.

A hard-boiled little lamb going to talk a lot of lions out of their dinner, Comyn told himself grimly.

Han Solo: You like me because I'm a scoundrel. There aren't enough scoundrels in your life. Princess Leia Organa: I happen to like nice men. Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

I know now what lies across the land, the slow and heavy weight. They call it faith, but it is not faith. It is fear. The people have clapped a shelter over their heads, a necessity of ignorance, a passion of retreat, and they have called it God, and worshiped it.

Ed McBain (as Evan Hunter and Richard Marsten), Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Andrew Vachss, Loren D. Estleman, Carroll John Daly, Brett Halliday, Raoul Whitfield, Mark Timlin, Richard Prather, Leigh Brackett, Erle Stanley Gardner (pre Perry Mason), James Ellroy, Clark Howard, Max Brand. In addition, rising paper costs prevented me from making this volume even heavier, as I had to withdraw material by Ed Gorman, James Reasoner, Ed Lacy, Frank Gruber, Loren D. Estleman, Derek Raymond, Robert Edmond Alter, Frederick C. Davis and Jonathan Craig – so look out for these names elsewhere. They are certainly worth a detour. But the

The door opened and she came out. She was wearing a red dress. It was faded a little, and there were streaks and creases in it from having been folded away for a long time, but those were unimportant things. It was red. It was made of some soft, shiny, slithery stuff that rustled when she moved, and it came clear down to the floor, hiding her feet, but that was about all it hid. It fitted tight around her waist and hips and outlined her thighs when she walked forward, and above the waist there wasn’t very much at all. She held out her arms at the sides and turned around slowly. Her back and shoulders were bare, white and gleaming in the sunlight that fell through the window, and her breasts were sharply outlined in the red cloth, showing above it in two half-moon curves, and her black hair fell down, dark and glossy over her white skin. “It belonged to my great-grandmother. Do you like it?” Len said, “Christ.” He stared and stared, and his face was almost as red as the dress. “It’s the most indecent thing I ever saw.” “I

And it will betray its worshipers, leaving them defenseless in the face of a tomorrow that will surely come. It may be a slow coming, and a long one, but come it will, and all their desperation will not stop it. Nothing will stop it. “I

Being convinced that reason operates automatically within him he orders his life and his government upon emotion and superstition.

They would say anything, because they have dreamed this dream too long to be denied.

Oh God, you make the ones like Brother James who never question, and you make the ones like Esau who never believe, and why do you have to make the in-between ones like me? But

…For one timeless ghastly interval he thought he saw the fabric of the ship itself dissolving with him into a mist of discrete particles, he knew that he wasn’t human anymore and nothing was real. And then plunged headlong into nothingness.

Comyn thought it was funny. It was very funny, indeed, that men making the second Big Jump in history, that men going faster and farther than any men but five had ever gone before, separated only by metal walls from the awfulness of infinity, should sit and play games with little plastic cards and pretend they were not where they were.

Ballantyne made the Big Jump, he and the men with him. They did the biggest thin men have ever done. They reached out and touched the stars. And you tried to hide it, to cover it up, to rob them even of the glory they had coming.

The Big Jump had been made. Man had finally reached the stars, and every clerk and shopgirl, every housewife, busisnessman, and bum felt a personal hysteria of pride and achievement. They swayed in dense masses across Times Square feeling big with a sense of history, sensing the opening drumbeats of an epoch in what they saw and heard from the huge news-service screens.

Sooner or later a man has to stop and choose his way, not out of the ways he would like there to be, or the ways there ought to be, but out of the ways there are.