Jack Finney Quotes

#1. And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.

Jack Finney

#2. When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.

Jack Finney

#3. He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.

Jack Finney

#4. So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.

Jack Finney

#5. Maybe I live in what is for me the wrong time.

Jack Finney

#6. The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not.

Jack Finney

#7. I went up a straight crooked lane and, I said 'No thanks, yes if yer please.

Jack Finney

#8. Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

Jack Finney

#9. She wasn't actually a girl you'd turn around and look at again, and remember, I suppose; she wasn't actually pretty, I guess you'd have to say. But after I'd talked to her a few times, and had a Coke date once, when I ran into her downtown-then she was pretty.

Jack Finney

#10. It occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act;

Jack Finney

#11. Anyway, there's a time and place for everything, and while this may have been the place, it wasn't the time.

Jack Finney

#12. As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there.

Jack Finney

#13. You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you.

Jack Finney

#14. If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.

Jack Finney

#15. The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe - from sub-atomic particles to the universe - except itself.

Jack Finney

#16. But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope.

Jack Finney

#17. The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer.

Jack Finney

#18. It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.

Jack Finney

#19. Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it's your function, your reason for being. There's no other reason, and none needed.

Jack Finney