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The Door Into Summer QUOTES

The Door Into Summer QUOTES

1 " I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

2 " Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

3 " When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

4 " That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

5 " I had taken a partner once before-but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

6 " I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

7 " You can die anyplace. They’ve never managed to regulate that. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

8 " These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

9 " There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

10 " Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

11 " Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

12 " There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

13 " joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

14 " I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

15 " Be raped quietly, you mean. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

16 " The more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

17 " I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured.
But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer. If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

18 " Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park—I "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

19 " But I gathered that it was classified...by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.” “Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer

20 " But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy. "

― Robert A. Heinlein , The Door Into Summer