Privilege tends to soften the brain, or so I’ve observed.

Rutherford was a historian, after all, and secretly enjoyed it when the truth did injury to modern sensibilities.

You have to be pretty damned hot and thirsty to enjoy a soy-milk smoothie, but they were, so it was okay.

Terrorism was too tame for the Scots: they used lawyers.”

Faith and its attendant rituals sound like a good deal, the whole eternal salvation thing, but inevitably they lead to fear, oppression, the rack and flames.

In 1916, Universal Studios released the first filmed adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’ Georges Melies made a film by that name in 1907, but, unlike his earlier adaptations of Verne, Melies’ version bears no resemblance to the book.

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution.

1925’s ‘The Lost World’ is… really, everything a dinosaur movie should be. Like a dinosaur, this classic was once extinct too, existing as mere fragmentary footage and stills, but cinemaphile fossil-hunters have painstakingly excavated bits and pieces from obscure archives and assembled them into a nearly-complete animal.

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I’m here in person to tell you it ain’t so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.

A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called ‘Les Mains d’Orlac.’ Call it a bastard offspring of ‘Frankenstein;’ its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn’t Have – in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

So vast is the shadow cast by the MGM production of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ so indelible are its characterizations, so perfect its music, and so assured is its cinematic immortality, that most people think of it as ‘The Original.’ In fact, it isn’t.

For all its flaws, ‘The Hands of Orlac’ really is a seminal film, and if you’re partial to that particular B-movie subgenre of Demon Body Parts, you really ought to see it.

What has ‘The Patchwork Girl of Oz’ got in its favor? Quite a lot, from our point of view in 2009. If you want to see how Oz’s creator envisioned his own work, here it is.

I saw the Kino print of ‘The Man From Beyond,’ but apparently a superior new print has been produced by Restored Serials. Maybe a few snippets of missing footage will close up some of the plot holes, but I have my doubts.

We who grew up with ‘drop and cover’ drills know all too well what wonders science can bring us, and we like to see the guy in the white lab coat suffer a little. Or a lot.

According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein’s monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.

Written and directed by French showman Georges Melies, ‘Le Voyage’ features one of the most indelible images in cinema history: the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain with a space capsule protruding from his right eye.

Let’s say you need a perfectly obedient servant who never gets tired, never needs to be paid, and is virtually indestructible. If you’re in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, you’ll just fly off to the local droid auction and pick up one of those shiny gold models with lovely manners.

I’m still learning my craft, and I’ve been writing since I was nine.

There is only so much one can do for the dead without joining them.

We are time machines! The truth’s been right in front of our noses since cinema was invented. Hell, since photography was invented. Hell, since writing was invented. Make an image of something, and it escapes the flow of time. That’s why it’s forbidden! Dickens had a grasp on it with his ghosts, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley almost got it, and Einstein came so close to the truth.

It was suitably like limbo to depress the spirits of an ordinary man, let alone one with Alec’s problems.

He is aware that he feels a vague respect for the woman. Mendoza, at least, had never done the reasonable thing, never settled for less, but held to her one insane passion even as it had dragged her into the flames. Such a valuable quality in a pawn.

Smashing things is the violent way stupid mortal monkeys solve their problems.

Nurse Balnshik, Lord Emenwyr’s minder, is 100% demon, but glamorous:
“Do you know any other midwife who can also tear apart armored warriors with her bare, er, hands? Lovely and versatile.

If you ordered up a whore here, you’d probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?” His eyes lit up for a moment. “I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a whore and a Hershey bar?

To make a really effective monster you need to begin with a good man and tell him lies.

Boy, you’re good at figuring things out. Isn’t he? Except that if anybody’s the devil in this room it’s _you_, buster.” An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. “I’ve seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You’re so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it’s true, because you’re stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_.

A lengthy and painful discussion followed. It lasted through tea and dinner. It was revealed to Lady Beatrice that, though she had been sincerely mourned when Mamma had been under the impression she was dead, her unexpected return to life was something more than inconvenient. Had she never considered the disgrace she would inflict upon her family by returning, after all that had happened to her? What were all Aunt Harriet’s neighbors to think?

That is what you’re making of the end of your mother’s life, child. What will you make of your own?

It wasn’t all that different from any particularly demanding boarding school, except that of course nobody ever went home for the holidays and we had a lot of brain surgery.

Worldly institutions fail because they require power and gold to operate. Power and gold attract wicked and greedy people. Wicked and greedy people are corrupters and betrayers. Therefore, worldly institutions become corrupt and betrayed.

Arrows you may dodge and fever you may antibody for, but mortal grief is a misfortune you cannot escape.

No one deserves good or evil fortune,” said Lady Beatrice. “Things simply happen and one survives them the best one can.

True believers aren’t real receptive to the idea that what they’re telling you is just mythology.

I only became aware that my eyes had filled with tears when I noticed some commotion in the treetops, far off outside the perimeter wall. I blinked and looked again. There were monkeys out there fighting, screaming and pelting one another with rotten fruit.

And as the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so was my beloved among the sons. Et cetera. What would I give, to have that night back, out of all my nights? No treasure fleet could hold it, what I’d give; no caravan of mules could carry it away.

People like these have done more to relieve human misery than any prophet with a manifesto ever will. They number in the millions, these mortals, but they don’t make it into the history books much. They don’t do anything sweeping or controversial. They live their lives, contribute their bits of good work, and die quietly in their beds without recognition or reward. Usually.

You know why I’ve survived in this job, year after year, lousy assignment after lousy assignment, with no counseling whatsoever? Because I have a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. Also because I have no choice.

Lady, the Faith is here,” he stated. “But we must build churches in our hearts, for surely those built in the world have all betrayed us.

I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.

People who like to fume about the manner in which Disney changed beloved classics are often ignorant of history, not to mention the realities of show business.

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It’s king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.

The 1910 Edison film of Frankenstein was itself a dead thing revived by technology.

I detest flying anywhere. Left to my own devices, I’d never leave my keyboard.

The leaf that spreads in the light is the only holiness there is. I haven’t found holiness in the faiths of mortals, or in their music, not in their dreams: it’s out in the open field, with the green rows looking at the sky. I don’t know what it is, this holiness: but it’s there, and it looks at the sky.
Probably though this is some conditioning the Company installed to ensure I’d be a good botanist. Well, I grew up into a good one. Damned good.

Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.

I don’t think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It’s instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That’s why I write science fiction — even though the term ‘science fiction’ excites disdain in certain persons.

Besides, we weren’t made to battle villains, because there weren’t any. No nation, creed, or race was any better or worse than another; all were flawed, all were equally doomed to suffering, mostly because they couldn’t see that they were all alike. Mortals might have been contemptible, true, but not evil entirely. They did enjoy killing one another and frequently came up with ingenious excuses for doing so on a grand scale-religions, economic theories, ethnic pride-but we couldn’t condemn them for it, as it was in their mortal natures and they were too stupid to know any better.

I may cut my coat to follow fashion, sir, but not my conscience.

Romantic Orientalism was fascinated by the color and excitement of a powerful culture, and nearly always approached its subject with love.

In 1921, Harry Houdini started his own film company called – wait for it – the Houdini Picture Corporation.

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 ‘Wizard of Oz.’ I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

One should always avoid unnecessary unhappiness. Especially if one is an immortal. They taught us that in school.