Catherine Lucille Moore (1911-1987)
C. L. Moore was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, who first came to prominence in the 1930s writing as C. L. Moore. (C. L. Moore Quotes)
“He shook his head at the bright world in the sky. He would have to get over the habit of regarding the heavens as a chart with a glittering pinhead for each planet, and so many thousand Thresholders, ex-Earth-born, bred for the ecology of alien worlds, pinned up there upon the black velvet backdrop for study and control. It wasn’t his problem anymore.”
C. L. Moore
Judgment Night
“The explorers and the drifters and the spacehands are misfits mostly, and, therefore, men of imagination. The contrast between the rigid functionalism inside a spaceship and the immeasurable glories outside is too great not to have a name. So whenever you stand in a ship’s control room and look out into the bottomless dark where the blinding planets turn and the stars swim motionless in space, you are taking a walk down Paradise Street.”
C. L. Moore
Judgment Night
“This was what the loss of civilization really meant. For the first time the full impact of the Galaxy’s great loss overwhelmed her. So long as she could see those lost worlds she might hope to win them back, but to be struck blind like this was to lose them forever. She knew a sudden agony of homesickness for all the planets she might never see again, a sudden terrible nostalgia for the lost, familiar worlds, for the fathomless seas of space between them. Ericon’s eternal greenness was hateful, strangling in its tiny limitations.”
C. L. Moore
Judgment Night
“From the standpoint of logic, a child is rather horribly perfect. A baby may be even more perfect, but so alien to an adult that only superficial standards of comparison apply. The thought processes of an infant are completely unimaginable. But babies think, even before birth. In the womb they move and sleep, not entirely through instinct. We are conditioned to react rather peculiarly to the idea that a nearly-viable embryo may think. We are surprised, shocked into laughter, and repelled. Nothing human is alien. But a baby is not human. An embryo is far less human.”
C. L. Moore
Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943
“Ruthlessly a child can destroy the pretenses of an adult. Iconoclasm is their prerogative.”
C. L. Moore
Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943
“He knew it from the moment he looked into her eyes, and a shiver of unrest went over him as he met them. They were frankly green as young grass, with slit-like, feline pupils that pulsed unceasingly, and there was a look of dark, animal wisdom in their depths – that look of the beast which sees more than man.” (C. L. Moore Quotes)
C. L. Moore
Shambleau
“He was staring into a greater dark that held all things…He had known – dimly he had known when he first gazed into those flat animal shallows that behind them lay this – beauty and terror, all horror and delight, in the infinite darkness upon her eyes opened like windows, paned with emerald glass.”
C. L. Moore
Shambleau
“Those ceaselessly pulsing pupils disturbed him, but it seemed to him, vaguely, that behind the animal shallows of her gaze was a shutter – a closed barrier that might at any moment open to reveal the very deeps of that dark knowledge he sensed there.”
C. L. Moore
Shambleau
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