Henry Kuttner

When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.

— Henry Kuttner

We are all part of some cosmic pattern, and this pattern works toward good and not evil. It builds and does not destroy. So I shall go on in my search for a race where I can find kinship and happiness.

— Henry Kuttner

The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed. Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life....

— Henry Kuttner

We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here.

— Henry Kuttner

In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a dagger's blow or a strangler's hands.

— Henry Kuttner

Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. "For," he thought, "a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtar's hand saved me, one never knows." Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so.

— Henry Kuttner

The stars glittered frostily overhead, unconcerned with the fate of Atlantis — stars that would be shining thousands of years hence when Atlantis was not even a memory.

— Henry Kuttner

Love is a false synonym for propagation, as the soul is a wish fulfillment creation growing out of self-preservation.

— Henry Kuttner

Man has the hardest job of all, the job of making decisions on incomplete data.

— Henry Kuttner

The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other.

— Henry Kuttner

The whole thing never happened and I can prove it — now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story. So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space.

— Henry Kuttner

I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor. I saw it, though. I saw it...

— Henry Kuttner

For me, the Big Ride. You start when you’re born. You climb on the toboggan and then you’re off. But you can only have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-taker you want to go again. They shovel you under at the end of the slope and there’s a new lot of passengers waiting. You’ve had your three-score and ten. And it’s over.

— Henry Kuttner

He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius.

— Henry Kuttner

The race moves on. It has its human limitations. The tools we make have no limitations at all. When we educate ourselves to learn to handle those tools most efficiently we can go on to the next step, whatever it may be. Meanwhile there must be check and balance—rigid control.

— Henry Kuttner

I'm going forward. I know — because I went. It was a wonderful world they had. I want to see more of it. I want to wake up in a time when the race of man is spreading through the galaxy, leaping across the gulfs between the stars, opening the gates to all the worlds. I want to and I will.

— Henry Kuttner

Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me...

— Henry Kuttner

There is a sword," I said. "A sword that is — is not quite a sword as we think of weapons. My mind is cloudy there still. But I know that Ghast Rhymi can tell me where it is. A weapon, yet not a weapon. The Sword Called Llyr.

— Henry Kuttner

Her hands came out of her sleeves. There was a rod of blinding silver in each. Before I could stir she had brought the rods together, crossing them before her smiling face. At the intersection forces of tremendous power blazed into an instant's being, forces that streamed from the poles of the world and could touch only for the beat of a second if that world were not to be shaken into fragments. I felt the building reel below me. I felt the gateway open.

— Henry Kuttner