Home > Author > Pat Frank
1 " It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education. "
― Pat Frank , Alas, Babylon
2 " It was during this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid. "
― Pat Frank , Hold Back the Night
3 " I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished . . . when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here. "
4 " If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man. "
5 " 'Legs are for men's pleasure, breasts are for babies'.' " - Lib McGovern "
6 " 'I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You're vegetating. I don't want a vegetable. I want a man.' " - Lib McGovern "
7 " Out of death, life; an immutable truth "
8 " It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living. "
9 " A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb's fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation. "
10 " Randy knew he wasn't an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast, and therefore not so depraved. "
11 " I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat. "
12 " [He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster. "
13 " There’s an old saying that anyone can make colonel on his own, but it takes a wife to make a general. "
14 " Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies.” It "
15 " With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan. And yet Randy stopped...The incident was important only because it was self-revelatory. Randy knew he would have to play by the old rules. He could not shuck his code, or sneak out of his era. "
16 " He was tough as an antique ivory figurine, which has withstood the viscissitudes of centuries and can accept more. "
17 " Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty. "
18 " When he reached the last hole he saw, far to the west, a series of rockets bloom in the sky. He watched their green and yellow and red petals arch across the horizon, and fade into the gloom of the earth. It was very beautiful, but he recognized them for Chinese rockets. "
19 " His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens' heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear. "
20 " Whatever it is out there, is better equipped than you are. It can see better and hear better and smell better. All you’re got on it is brains. Your only chance of getting it is "
