from works of
Fantasy
by various authors

No sir, he just wasn’t cut out for petty larceny. It was worse than a sin—it was unprofitable, too. Bad enough to do the Devil’s work, but then to get such miserable pay on top of it!

“Oh, good heavens! Great elephantine, cloudy, adamant heavens full of thunder stones! Roger! You can’t be serious. Are you?”

Roger was looking around and drumming his forefinger against his teeth. “If I were serious I would never have become a wizard, would I? The fact that it’s been done before doesn’t stop it from happening again.”

“Man bein’ what he is,” I tell her, “he fights and kills his own kind. Well, now, just suppose he gets to be immortal. Why, ma’am, it would just be war forever, and no happiness anywhere. Way it is, mostly the ones who rule have done more harm than good, what with wars and conquest. If they couldn’t die off and give the human race a breathin’ spell now and then, it would just be stinkin’ awful, beggin’ your pardon.”

But you wouldn’t expect anybody who thinks twice about it to ask to be made immortal.

Reason is there’s nothing that rightly equals the lonesomeness of growin’ older after all your friends die off. Nobody to talk to, lessn it’s little tots, because the grown-ups don’t want to hear about the good old days, and they don’t want to take you with ’em social.

There are things that are funny so that you laugh at them, and there are things that are funny but you don’t laugh at them at all—at least, if you do, you aren’t laughing because they amuse you: you are doing what Bergson says you do when you laugh—you are snarling. You are up against something you don’t understand—or something you understand too well, but don’t want to give in to.

“All right, I’ll give you money. But on one condition. One of my eyes is a glass eye. Tell me which eye it is and you shall have all I possess.”

The beggar looked at him intently, and at length said solemly:

“Your right eye, Master, is the glass eye.”

The philosopher was astonished.

“Tell me how you knew,” he cried. “That eye was made by the greatest craftsman in the world—it should be impossible to tell it from a real eye. How did you know that my right eye was the glass one?”

“Because, Master,” said the beggar slowly, “because your right eye was the one that had a compassionate look in it.”

There ought to be laws for machines the same as for people.

I would say something—anything—and she would try to say something that rhymed with it. Then it would be her turn. [...]

I started off with “We’ll go home and eat our dinners.”

“An’ Lord have mercy on us sinners,” she cried. Then, “Let’s see you find a rhyme for ‘month’!”

“I bet I’ll do it . . . jutht thith onth,” I replied. “I guess I did it then, by cracky.”

“Course you did, but then you’re wacky. Top that, mister funny-lookin’!”

I pretended I couldn’t, mainly because I couldn’t, and she soundly kicked my shin as a penance.