Quotes from Roger Zelazny

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes. Sam held out his hand. Give me some tobacco and a paper. He accepted the package, rolled himself a cigarette. Light? ...Thanks.

Two versions of the same face looking into blank screens, two very different minds thinking of things unsaid. Sometimes love is in silence.

Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons, Lord of Light.

So let sleeping wyverns lie.

To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying, 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them.

Amber has never been noted for its squeamishness," she said. "You have been exposed to too much American journalism.

Spavati, možda i sanjati...

Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true.

What's truth, anyway? Truth is what you make it.

If he chooses instead the way of the Tantras, combining Samsara and Nirvana, comprehending the world and continuing to live in it, this one is mighty among dreamers.

so he refolded his smile and put it away.

The Nameless, of which we are all a part, does dream form. And what is the highest attribute any form may possess? It is beauty. The Nameless, then, is an artist.

I look upon the flows of energy which are your real being - not the flesh that masks them.

There, in the worlds of the Life and the Death, the worlds that she used to know. Now, some say her name is Mercy, and others say it's Lust. Her secret name is Isis. Her secret soul is Dust.

The nearby Hopis danced and prayed for rain. His people did not. They sought to live with their environment rather than to control it.

But look around you...  Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

Raping a planet involves considerable expense. Enormous blasters and slicers and sluicers and refiners are required to reduce a world back almost to a state of primal chaos, and then to extract from it its essential (i.e., commercially viable) ingredients. The history books may tell you of strip-mining on the mother planet, back in ancient times. Well, the crude processes employed then were similar in emphasis and results, but the operations were considerably smaller in size.

Each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of moontide, the slow poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.

Sve dok nisam došao do ?arobne rije?i. Amber. (...) Rije? bijaše nabijena strahovitom ?ežnjom i golemom nostalgijom. Imala je, zamotan u sebi, osje?aj zaboravljene ljepote, grandioznih dostignu?a i mo?i užasne i gotovo kona?ne. Nekako, ta je rije? pripadala mom rje?niku. I nekako, ja bijah dio nje, a ona dio mene. Bijaše to ime mjesta, znao sam, mjesta koje sam neko? poznavao. Ali nije izazivala nikakve slike, samo osje?aje.

child of Amber may walk among them, and such was my heritage. You may call them parallel worlds if you wish, alternate universes if you would, the products of a deranged mind if you care to. I call them shadows, as do all who possess the power to walk among them. We select a possibility and we walk until we reach it. So, in a sense, we create it.

I collapsed into the chair. I am what might be called a slow starter. I tend to recapitulate phylogeny every morning. Basic desires inched their ways through my gray matter to close a connection. Slowly, I extended a cold-blooded member and clicked my talons against a couple of numbers. I croaked my desire for food and lots of coffee to the voice that responded. Half an hour later I would only have growled. Then I staggered off to the place of flowing waters to renew my contact with basics.

Fiona and Brand had reached beyond everything and found something, where none of the rest of us had believed anything to exist. The danger released was, on some level, almost worth the evidence obtained: we were not alone, nor were shadows truly our toys.

I wait for the blackness, the emptiness, to be drawn, appropriate curtain for the theatrics with which I am burdened this night.

I am Dara. Dara of Amber. Queen Dara. I hold this throne by right of blood and conquest.