K.W. Jeter Quotes

#1. Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ Herr Doktor Pavel

K.W. Jeter

#2. That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.

K.W. Jeter

#3. Life's nothing but the beating you take before you die. And I've died so many times already. Killed and lost so much. The remains.

K.W. Jeter

#4. I beg you to read no further.

K.W. Jeter

#5. It's one thing to face great odds, but even the smallest struggle, if undertaken without hope, looms and swells with the fatal poisons of despair.

K.W. Jeter

#6. It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.

K.W. Jeter

#7. Creff was visibly agitated by the stranger's appearance at our door. Memory calls to mind the anxious wringing of his hands, resembling two furless pink badgers wrestling for each other's throats ...

K.W. Jeter

#8. To retrieve the past is no great effort, when the events to be recalled are so firmly imprinted on the mind. It is existence in the present, the bleak wreckage and residue of what has gone before, that is so burdensome.

K.W. Jeter

#9. Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.

K.W. Jeter

#10. Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.

K.W. Jeter

#11. If you are connected you're fucked.

K.W. Jeter

#12. Creff, my factotum, interrupted the breakfast he had brought me only a few minutes earlier and announced that a crazed Ethiope was at the door, presumably to buy a watch.

K.W. Jeter

#13. Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use

K.W. Jeter

#14. He turned away from me, the better to hide the exclamation of annoyance which he muttered under his breath; I caught only what seemed to be the syllable cog (perhaps a reference to my mechanical trade) and the word succour (a prayer for divine assistance?).

K.W. Jeter

#15. All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.

K.W. Jeter

#16. I had always thought myself to be a man of moderate passions indistinguishable in that respect from most Englishmen born to our logical and mannered times.

K.W. Jeter