Walter M. Miller Quotes

Bless me Father, I ate a lizard.

One should be embarrassed to speak of God in the third person.

I'm not so sure he's mad, Father. Just a little devious in his sanity.

....to abuse the intellect for reasons of pride, vanity, or escape from responsibility, is the fruit of that same tree.

But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

Listen, my dear Cors, why don't you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn't allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things.

That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins.

Soon the sun will set'- is that prophecy? No, it's merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events.

Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.

When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.

Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it's not decades away; it's right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.

The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others.

It is said that water is for cattle and farmers, that milk is for children and blood for men.

For no change comes calmly over the world.

....Nature imposes nothing on you that Nature doesn't prepare you to bear.

Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think- as long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste.

When Holy Church occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker.

Ask for an omen, then stone it when it comes -- de essentia hominum.

But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.

Steel screams when it's forged, it gasps when it's quenched. It creaks when it goes under load. I think even steel is scared, son.

Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately.

He did not like saying it. To communicate a fact seemed always to lend it fuller existence.

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.

What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden?

It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.

What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give the, Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn the, that it could never be Eden?

I mean Jesus never asked a man to do a damn thing that Jesus didn’t do.

After twelve centuries, a little hope had come into the world - and then came an illiterate prince to ride roughshod over it with a barbarian horde and...