Terry Carr

Terry Gene Carr (February 19, 1937 – April 7, 1987) was an American science fiction fan, author, editor, and writing instructor.

Quotes

Short fiction

The Light at the End of the Universe (1976)

Page numbers from the mass market paperback first edition, published by Pyramid Books, ISBN 0-515-03982-9

See Terry Carr's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details

Italics and ellipses (unless noted) as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

• I was ambassador to a planetful of things that would tell me with a straight face that two and two are orange.
  • The Dance of the Changer and the Three (p. 34)

• “Oh yes,” he said, “your theories of contaminating your body with thinking. You have endless theories, Mike; you even have elaborately thought-out reasons for not thinking at all.”
  • The Winds at Starmont (p. 40)

• He never used his last name; he hated his family.…
  “A man becomes an adult when he leaves his family,” he said. “I’ve been an adult since I was ten.”
  • The Winds at Starmont (p. 48; ellipsis represents elision of a short descriptive passage)

• “Magic charms?” Randolph said.
  “Yes,” the man said slowly. “Some are real, some are not.”
  “And I suppose the real ones are more expensive.”
  “They are all roughly the same price. It’s up to you to decide which ones are real.”
  • Touchstone (p. 146)

• On his college debating team he always chose to defend religious issues rather than secular ones because he prefer the greater challenge.
  • Changing of the Gods (p. 180)

• When he was in college he had one of those mystic experiences that were so fashionable in the seventies. A friend, a roommate who wore his hair cropped Navajo fashion and who liked to rhapsodize about the beauty of scorpions, took him on a backpacking trip to the Great Salt Flats, where they walked due west for three days and took peyote. His friend had brought twenty-five of the little alkaloid buttons, which looks remarkably like a collection of mummified fragments that Luckman had once seen in a small museum connected to a skating rink. The two of them sat crosslegged in the whitened dust and took turns grinding the peyote. When they ate the dark powder, washing it down with organic papaya juice, Luckman was unable to believe how vile it tasted but his friend just smiled and spoke of investments of energy in a way that made him sound like a Freudian analyst justifying the size of his bill. Luckman had been sick for two hours, heaving and crawling in the desert, beaten down, wretched and not really minding all that much. He came to see that the universe was a matter of intake and output, expansion and contraction, and these were the same thing, so that the question of which happened first, the Big Bang or the coalescence, was meaningless. For the rest of his life Luckman was unable to think of religion without feeling nauseated, and sometimes when he drank too much he would lie on the floor in the bathroom with puke on his chin, feeling oddly at peace with the world.
  • Changing of the Gods (pp. 180-181)

• The little people of the world never realize how dependent upon them we are, he thought. We are parasites, sucking their blood to maintain ourselves. Then he frowned, annoyed at his own simile. No, not parasites … carnivores. The kings made by natural law … feared by the weak, fed by the slow of foot and the slow of mind.
  • Sleeping Beauty (pp. 234-235)

• I was thunderstruck as the meaning of the robot’s words came through to me. “You mean … you actually caused that assassination? It wouldn’t have happened otherwise?”
  “Ah … no. Nor would the European war have spread so far. It is one of our errors which we would like to forget if we were human, but since we are robots with fantastically infallible memories which amaze even us, we must remember it and continue to work on that entire area of history. Since the initial error was our own, we cannot restructure it, but by working in those areas not touched by our earlier work we have already managed to keep Venezuela, Switzerland and Tahiti out of the war.”
  • The Robots Are Here (p. 276)

• Huizinga said that culture began as an expression of our play instinct: We built new shapes, we imitated things we saw, we learned how to make other things do what we wanted. Not in the interests of building a civilization, only of getting a kick out of life. Civilization came with that and the new shapes were standardized. Culture told us to do what it wanted, and we did. The play went out of it quickly.
  That’s why culture is for unhappy people. That’s why the ecstatics always got off in the desert.
  • They Live on Levels (p. 286)