Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you're gone and there's no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It's all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.

Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung. To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven.

If we have a phased redeployment where we're as careful getting out as we were careless getting in, then there's not reason why we shouldn't be able to prevent the wholesale slaughter I think some people have suggested might occur.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

The people around you are you. They share your history. They can even write it with you. And when you lose one, there's no doubt you lose some of yourself, however they're lost.

Then she saw a star fall, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. “Someone is dying,” thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only one who had ever loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star falls, a soul was going up to God.

There is nothing ugly about death; but man, out of his fear, has made even the word, death ugly and unutterable. People don't like to talk about it. They won't even listen to the word death.

I have a lot of mental issues that I just am so fearful of things, which I shouldn't be, right? Scared of heights. Scared of buildings falling on me. Scared of the dark. Scared of crowds. Those are my biggest issues. I'm just scared of people. It's just - in general.

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?...Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts....They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind." "Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles." "The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.

When you get old the worst thing is you lose so many friends. Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne. People who I loved to work with.

Some people hold themselves above the fashion business but are still complicit and fall prey to it.

People will always put you in a box that they think you fit in, and it's up to you to not fall into it.

Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich's grave; it falls in our hearts.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

I have heard people say that they felt closer to their parents after they have died. Maybe if I treat people as if they were dead, I could get along with them better

Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers.

Hell was not part of the original creation. Hell is God's fall-back position. Hell is something God was forced to make because people chose to rebel against him and turn against what was best for them and the purpose for which they were created.

You get used to falling in love with people and having to let them go.

There were worse things than dying, and those worse things happened to the people you left behind.

The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

People who have had family members killed are able to forgive the murderer because that's the only way they can move on.

These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?