A Canticle for Leibowitz Events Quotes

The universe contracted; at its exact geometric center floated that sandy tidbit of dark bread and pale cheese. A demon commanded the muscles of his left leg to move his left foot half a yard forwa...

While a little wary yet of lurking Fallouts, Francis had sufficiently recovered from his initial fright to realize that the shelter, notably the desk and the lockers, might well be teeming with ric...

There was nothing to do but obey the command to return. (3.72)

Father Cheroki, who came of baronial stock from Denver, tended to react formally to men's official capacities, tended to speak courteously to the badge of office while not allowing himself to see t...

So was Francis called by his own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as could be taught in those days, and, because there were no schools but the monastic schools, he had donned the habit firs...

To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to any sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks' robes and tried...

"All right," Francis sighed, "I don't know. But I have a certain faith that the 'electron' existed at one time, although I don't know how it was constructed or what it might have been used for." (7...

Brother Sarl finished the fifth page of his mathematical restoration, collapsed over his desk, and died a few hours later. Never mind. His notes were intact. Someone, after a century or two, would...

A General Council of the Church for the purpose of making a careful restatement of doctrine concerning the limitation of the magisterium to matters of faith and morals; it was a question which had...

Even the idiot which seems less gifted than a dog, or a pig, or a goat, shall, if born of woman, be called an immortal soul, thundered the magisterium, and thundered it again and again. After sever...

"Those years were spent to preserve this original. Never think of them as wasted. Offer them to God. Someday the meaning of the original may be discovered, and may prove important." The old man bli...

[Thon Taddeo] huffed impatiently. "The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe men once were. I can't accept it. How can a great and...

There were signs of progress in the world, and the village of Sanly Bowitts had achieved the fantastic literacy rate of eight per cent—for which the villagers might, but did not, thank the monks...

It had happened once before, so the Venerable Boedullus had asserted in his De Vestigiis Antecessarum Civitatum. (14.3)

"Tell me, what do you think of him?""I haven't seen him. But I suppose he will be a pain. A birth-pain, perhaps, but a pain.""Birth-pain? You really believe we're going to have a new Renaissance, a...

Dom Paulo felt the blackness beginning to gather. After twelve centuries, a little hope had come into the world—and then came an illiterate prince to ride roughshod over it with a barbarian horde...

The sixth monk climbed the shelf-ladder and took his seat on the top rung, his head bumping the top of the archway. He pulled a mask of smoke-blackened oily parchment over his face to protect his e...

A time was agreed upon, and Dom Paulo felt relief. The esoteric gulf between Christian monk and secular investigator of Nature would surely be narrowed by a free exchange of ides, he felt. (19.65)

But surely [Thon Taddeo] must know that never during his lifetime can he be more than a recoverer of lost works; however brilliant, he can only do what others before him had done. And so it would b...

"But you promise to begin restoring Man's control over Nature. But who will govern the use of the power to control natural forces? Who will use it? To what end? How will you hold him in check? Such...

Brother Kornhoer hesitated. "My vocation is to Religion," he said at last, "that is—to a life of prayer. We think of our work as a kind of prayer too. But that—" he gestured toward his dynamo "...

The buzzards strutted, preened, and quarreled over dinner; it was not yet properly cured. They waited a few days for the wolves. There was plenty for all. Finally they ate the Poet. (23.21)

Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens—and kick...

Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plow...

Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wande...

"'The provisions of Public Law 10-WR-3E in no way empower[s] private citizens to administer euthanasia to victims of radiation poisoning. Victims who have been exposed, or who think they have been...

She still said nothing. He blessed them and left as quickly as possible. The woman had handled the beads with fingers that knew them; there was nothing he could say to her that she didn't already k...

The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season. (30.8)