Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Imagine, if you can, a huge grizzly with ten legs armed with mighty talons and an enormous froglike mouth splitting his head from ear to ear, exposing three rows of long, white tusks. Then endow this creature of your imagination with the agility and ferocity of a half-starved Bengal tiger and the strength of a span of bulls, and you will have some faint conception of Woola in action.”

“Early the next morning I was astir. Considerable freedom was allowed me, as Sola had informed me that so long as I did not attempt to leave the city I was free to go and come as I pleased. She had warned me, however, against venturing forth unarmed, as this city, like all other deserted metropolises of an ancient Martian civilization, was peopled by the great white apes of my second day's adventure.”

“A warrior may change his metal, but not his heart.”

“And so he learned to read. From then on his progress was rapid.”

“Like its master, it was entirely devoid of hair, but was of a dark slate color and exceeding smooth and glossy. Its belly was white, and its legs shaded from the slate of its shoulders and hips to a vivid yellow at the feet. The feet themselves were heavily padded and nailless, which fact had also contributed to the noiselessness of their approach, and, in common with a multiplicity of legs, is a characteristic feature of the fauna of Mars. The highest type of man and one other animal, the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have well-formed nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in existence there.”

“My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes.”

“You are here for but an instant, and you mustn't take yourself too seriously”

“I have discovered that the world over, unusual weather prevails at all times of the year.”

“Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.”

“There was but a single forlorn hope, and I took it.”

“I am a very old man. How old I do not know. It is possible I am a hundred, maybe more. I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men do.”

“I shall have to believe even though I cannot understand.”

“I feel always that I am a prisoner.”

“Mine own people do not care for me, John Carter; I am too unlike them. It is a sad fate, since I must live my life amongst them.”

“We are between the wild thoat of certainty and the mad zitidar of fact - we can escape neither.”

“The path of the mighty beast was guided telepathically by the two people who sat in a huge saddle that was cinched to the thoat's broad back.”

“In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers.”

“If I had followed my better judgment always, my life would have been a very dull one.”

“The more one knows of one's religion the less one believes - no one living knows more of mine than I.”

“Later, Thuran also found it necessary to construct a similar primitive garment, so that, with their bare legs and heavily bearded faces, they looked not unlike reincarnations of two prehistoric progenitors of the human race. Thuran acted like one.”

“...those features are burned so deep into my memory and my heart that I should recognize them anywhere in the world from among a thousand others, who might appear identical to any one but me.”

“...it was his misfortune that most of the men he knew preferred immaculate linen and their clubs to nakedness and the jungle. It was, of course, difficult to understand, yet it was very evident that they did.”

“I am glad," he said, "that I do not dwell in your country among such savage peoples. Here, in Caspak, men fight with men when they meet - men of different races - but their weapons are first for the slaying of beasts in the chase and defense. We do not fashion weapons solely for the killing of man as do your peoples. Your country must indeed be a savage country, from which you are fortunate to have escaped to the peace and security of Caspak.”

“...my civilization is not even skin deep - it does not go deeper than my clothes.”

“In that little party there was not one who would desert another; yet we were of different countries, different colours, different races, different religions--and one of us was of a different world.”

“Captain Billings," he drawled finally, "if you will pardon my candor, I might remark that you are something of an ass, don't you know.”

“When Tarzan killed he more often smiled than scowled, and smiles are the foundation of beauty.”

“With man it is different. When he comes many of the larger animals instinctively leave the district entirely, seldom if ever to return; and thus it has always been with the great anthropoids. They flee man as man flees a pestilence.”

“Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here today evidences their victory.What they did may we not do? And even better, for are we not armed with ages of superior knowledge, and have we not the means of protection, defense, and sustenance which science has given us, but of which they were totally ignorant? What they accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that may we accomplish also.”

“They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.”

“I love you, and because I love you I believe in you. But if I did not believe, still should I love. Had you come back for me, and had there been no other way, I would have gone into the jungle with you - forever.”

“I am Tarzan of the Apes. I want you. I am yours. You are mine. We live here together always in my house. I will bring you the best of fruits, the tenderest deer, the finest meats that roam the jungle. I will hunt for you. I am the greatest of the jungle fighters. I will fight for you. I am the mightiest of the jungle fighters. You are Jane Porter, I saw it in your letter. When you see this you will know that it is for you and that Tarzan of the Apes loves you.”

“Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that point.”

“It is a characteristic of the weak and criminal to attribute to others the misfortunes that are the result of their own wickedness.”

“I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, "Tarzan and the Lost Empire", there are 31 books on my list.”

“If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten.”

“exsistance is not the cure it is the problem”

“(..)how a force of six or eight fight­ing men could have done so un­ob­served is be­yond me. We shall soon know, how­ev­er, for here comes the roy­al psy­chol­ogist.”

“Yes, I was a fool, but I was in love, and though I was suffering the greatest misery I had ever known I would not have had it otherwise for all the riches of Barsoom. Such is love, and such are lovers wherever love is known.”

“I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.”

“Emerging, as we had, from the dark and gloomy bowels of the earth, the scene before us presented a view of wondrous beauty, and, while doubtless enhanced by contrast, it was nevertheless such an aspect as is seldom given to the eyes, of a Barsoomian of today to view. To me it seemed a little garden spot upon a dying world preserved from an ancient era when Barsoom was young and meteorological conditions were such as to favor the growth of vegetation that has since become extinct over practically the entire area of the planet. In this deep valley, surrounded by lofty cliffs, the atmosphere doubtless was considerably denser than upon the surface of the planet above. The sun's days were reflected by the lofty escarpment, which must also hold the heat during the colder periods of night, and, in addition to this, there was ample water for irrigation which nature might easily have achieved through percolation of the waters of the river through and beneath the top soil of the valley.”

“I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.”

“[The little black boy] had seen Tarzan bring down a buck, just as Numa, the lion, might have done... Tibo had shuddered at the sight, but he had thrilled, too, and for the first time there entered his dull, Negroid mind a vague desire to emulate his savage foster parent. But Tibo, the little black boy, lacked the divine spark which had permitted Tarzan, the white boy, to benefit by his training in the ways of the fierce jungle. In imagination he was wanting, and imagination is but another name for super-intelligence.Imagination it is which builds bridges, and cities, and empires. The beasts know it not, the blacks only a little, while to one in a hundred thousand of earth's dominant race it is given as a gift from heaven that man may not perish from the earth.”

“Beast?" Jane murmured. "Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, I am yours.”

“Traveling through space is stupifyingly monotonous.”

“Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?”

“It must be that I am dreaming, and that I shall awaken in a moment to see that awful knife descending toward my heart- kiss me, dear, just once before I lose my dream forever."-Jane-”

“For myself, I always assume that a lion is ferocious, and so I am never caught off my guard.”

“No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”

“As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people.”