Ted Sturgeon: quotes

• There is in certain living souls
  A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
  So great it must be shared
  As company is shared by lesser beings.
  Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
  That in immensity
  There is one lonelier than you.
  ("A Saucer of Loneliness")
  
  
• Living a life is a very educational experience, one very much worth doing.
  (Introduction to book Alien Cargo)



• There is a vast number of honestly simple-minded people who can, without hesitation, define:

  pornography God right evil liberty law and order

  science fiction communism freedom honorable peace obscenity love

  and think, and act, and legislate, and sometimes burn, jail, and kill on the basis of their definitions. These are the Labellers, and they are one without exception the most lethal and destructive force ever faced by any species on this or any other planet..."
  (Postscript to Philip Jose Farmer's book "The Image of the Beast", 1968)



• Zena, thoughts are formless, coded... impulses without shape or substance or direction -- until you convey them to someone else. Then they precipitate, and become ideas that you can put out on the table and examine. You don't know what you think until you tell someone else about it.
  (the character Monetre, in "The Dreaming Jewels")



• You can learn more music theory in a year on guitar than you can in three on a piano, and music is one of the most human of human things...
  (the character Zena, in "The Dreaming Jewels")



• You can have her. After a time, however, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. It may not be logical, but it is often very true.
  (Spock, in the Star Trek episode "Amok Time"; "her" refers to a woman whose hand in marriage Spock has just won, but given away to a rival who she would rather be with.)
  
  
• A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.
  (listed at Definitions of Science Fiction)
  
  
• Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.
  (From an interview conducted by David Duncan)