He was crying in despair. Then he spoke aloud, to himself, in English. “Who are you?” he said. “And where do you belong?” His own body stared back at him; but he could not recognize it as his own. It was alien, and frightening.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon, Local Library]
He paused for a second, and asked, “Why did you work on the bomb?” Bryce thought for a minute. Then he laughed at his situation: using a Martian, in a bar, for a confessor. But perhaps it was appropriate. “I didn’t know it was going to be a bomb at first,” he said. “And in those days I believed in pure science. Reaching for the stars. Secrets of the atom. Our only hope in a chaotic world.” He finished the martini. “And you don’t believe those things anymore?” “No.”
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon, Local Library]
He had known about the general prosperity that had bloomed continuously, like the flower of some giant and impossibly hardy weed, for the forty years since the end of World War II, and he had known how this wealth had been distributed among and spent by the nearly all-inclusive middle class that, as every year passed, put more time into less productive work and made more money for it.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon, Local Library]
the old human belief in sin and redemption was meaningful to him and, he, like all Antheans, was quite familiar with the sense of guilt and the need for its expiation.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon, Local Library]
There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Then he remembered the cant he had talked, during the year that he had majored in English, when he was in his twenties: “levels of meaning.” “the semantic problem.” “the symbolical level.” Well, there were plenty of substitutes for knowledge and insight—false metaphors everywhere.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth [Amazon]
Yet, enjoyable as this might be, he had to remember that these people were more dangerous than chimpanzees—and it had been thousands of years since any of them had seen an Anthean undisguised.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth
He was fond of them and, with his fundamental human vanity, unable to resist the easy pleasure of exercising his mental superiority to their dumbfounded amazement.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth
It was as if one of these people—he always thought of them as “these people,” much as he had grown to like and to admire them—should find himself dealing with a group of very alert and resourceful chimpanzees.
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth
